amnesty
Mohammad Ghobadlou was sentenced to death almost two years ago.
CNN –
An Iranian protester with mental illness will be executed on Tuesday over the death of a local official during mass demonstrations in Iran in 2022, his lawyer Amir Raesian said on Monday.
Raesian wrote on
Ghobadlou was sentenced to death two years ago by Iranian judge Abolqasem Salavati. Salavati was previously sanctioned by the US over the notoriously harsh sentences he imposed on activists, journalists and political prisoners, CNN previously reported.
According to human rights group Amnesty International, Iranian authorities claim that Ghobadlou ran over a local official during a protest in Robat Karim, Tehran province, in September 2022.
According to Amnesty, he received two death sentences in connection with the death. The first death sentence was handed down by a Revolutionary Court on November 16, 2022 for “corruption on earth” and was confirmed by the Supreme Court the following month, the human rights group said. A second death sentence was handed down for “murder” by a criminal court in Tehran province at the end of December 2022, it said.
However, Amnesty criticized that the death sentences were handed down after “extremely unfair sham trials marred by torture-filled 'confessions' and a failure to order rigorous mental health assessments despite (Ghobadlou's) mental disability.”
According to Amnesty, Ghobadlou has been under the care of a psychiatric hospital since he was 15 due to bipolar disorder. According to Amnesty International, international laws and standards prohibit the use of the death penalty against people with intellectual disabilities.
Executions in Iran increased as the government cracked down on nationwide protests in 2022 after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the country's so-called moral police.
Authorities violently suppressed the months-long movement, which posed one of the biggest domestic threats to Iran's ruling clerical regime in more than a decade. Human rights groups noted last year that the sharp increase in executions reflected an attempt by Tehran to “incite fear” among anti-regime protesters.