Amnesty: 700 Executions in Iran in Just Six Months

01:01 - 30 July 2015
Kurdpa: It is believed the Iranian authorities have executed about 700 people in six months, according to Amnesty International.

Iran is believed to have executed 694 people between January 1 and July 15, 2015, said Amnesty International, resulting in an unprecedented spike in executions in the country.

This number is equivalent to executing more than three people per day. At this shocking pace, Iran is set to surpass the total number of executions in the country recorded by Amnesty International last year.

“Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale,” said Said Boumedouha, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

“If Iran’s authorities maintain this horrifying execution rate we are likely to see more than 1,000 state-sanctioned deaths by the year’s end”, he further added.

According to figures available to Kurdpa, 39 Kurds in Iran are believed to have been executed during that period of time.

Aside from these 39 executions, four Kurdish political prisoners have also received death sentences and currently await their executions.

“Among those executed in Iran are also members of ethnic and religious minorities convicted of ‘enmity against God’ and ‘corruption on earth’, including Kurdish political prisoners and Sunni Muslims”, read a new report by Amnesty International.

Based on information released by human rights organizations, several thousand people are believed to be on death row in Iran. According to Iranian authorities, 80% of those awaiting execution are convicted of drug-related offences.

“It is especially harrowing that there is no end in sight for this theatre of cruelty with Iran’s gallows awaiting thousands more death row prisoners”, said Boumedouha.

“Prisoners in Iran are often left languishing on death row, wondering each day if it will be their last. In many cases they are notified of their execution only a few hours beforehand and in some cases, families learn about the fate of their loved ones days, if not weeks, later”, concluded the report by Amnesty International.

In 2014, official sources confirmed 289 executions, however according to Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the figure stood at 753 for 2015.

Writing by Kurdpa Staff Writers and editing by Sharmin Hassaniani.


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