Amnesty International calls for urgent action to halt the death sentence of Kurdish prisoner Houshmand Alipour
Amnesty International UK has called for urgent action by human rights advocates to prevent the imminent execution of Houshmand Alipour, an Iranian Kurdish prisoner who was sentenced to death in January of last year after an "unfair trial".
Amnesty International UK, on its Urgent Actions page, urged its readers to write to Iranian judicial authorities demanding a halt to this execution.
Amnesty International says that Houshmand Alipour and another Kurdish prisoner were denied a fair trial and confessed under torture in an IRGC detention center, and that Mr. Alipour has been sentenced to death on charges of “armed rebellion against the state.” Amnesty International is calling on the Islamic Republic of Iran to overturn this sentence and provide him and the other detained defendants with a fair trial.
Houshmand Alipour and Mohammad Ostadghader were arrested by security forces in the city of Saqqez on August 2, 2018, and Alipour was sentenced to death a year later on November 2, 2019. The Islamic Republic claimed that the two were “members of a Kurdish party opposed to the regime,” and last year their confessions were broadcast on the Islamic Republic’s state-run radio and television. Amnesty International expressed concern at the time in response to these confessions. Sources close to the two prisoners later announced that the two had been tortured in the Revolutionary Guards’ detention center and that forced confessions were extracted from them.
In recent months, the Iranian judiciary has repeatedly criticized and protested the execution of opponents and protest participants by issuing death sentences. Last month, Amnesty International protested the execution of Mostafa Salehi, one of the detainees from the protests of November last year.
The death sentences for three other detainees from the November protests, Amirhossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi, and Mohammad Rajabi, were also widely criticized by Persian-speaking Twitter users, with the hashtag “Don’t Execute” trending on Twitter. This action prompted the Iranian judiciary to halt the execution of the sentence and send the case back to the Supreme Court for retrial.
Source: Voice of America
