– /AFP
Mohsen Shekarimer has been hanged in Iran after being found guilty of injuring a member of a paramilitary force, the judiciary said on Thursday (December 8). (Image: Photo by Mohsen Shekarimer displayed on a phone)
IRAN – The death penalty to foment fear and further quell dissent. Iran executed a man, Mohsen Shekari, this Thursday, December 8, for the first time since demonstrations began that have shaken the country since mid-September. This act led to numerous convictions abroad and warnings from human rights organizations that further executions were imminent. Concern is all the greater given the mass executions of political prisoners in Iran as early as the 1980s.
Mohsen Shekari, 23, was found guilty and sentenced to death for blocking a road and injuring a paramilitary officer when the protests began. The ensuing trial was dubbed a “show trial” by human rights groups.
A “death sentence campaign”
Amnesty International was “horrified” by the execution, which the NGO said came just three weeks after Mohsen Shekari’s conviction in a “very unfair show trial”. “His execution exposes the inhumanity of the so-called Iranian judicial system, while dozens of others face the same fate,” Amnesty added.
At least a dozen others face imminent execution after being sentenced to death by hanging in connection with the protests, human rights groups have warned. Javaid Rehman, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, warns RFI Radio of an outright “death sentence campaign”. According to him, 21 people face execution.
At least 28 people, including three minors, could be executed in connection with the protest, Amnesty said on December 2. The protest movement, sparked by the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who died after being arrested by vice squads, is being used by the authorities as a pretext to carry out new massacres. “But also to increase the use of the death penalty as an instrument of political repression,” Amnesty denounces on its website.
Mass executions of political prisoners from 1981 to 1989
An act of intimidation that, unfortunately, is nothing new. The death penalty has been used extensively by Iran for at least thirty years to repress Iranian men and women who rebel like the Islamic Republic.
“The Iranian regime is no stranger to mass executions of political prisoners. It is one of the most brutal regimes on the planet,” said Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist specializing in the Iranian regime, on his Twitter account on November 15. “In 1988, by decree of its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, the regime executed between 2,500 and 30,000 political prisoners. The exact number is unknown,” he explains.
The Iranian regime is no stranger to mass executions of political prisoners. It is one of the most brutal regimes on t… https://t.co/LqoKY5ZrcI
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86)
The mass executions of men and women political prisoners took place in the country’s prisons from 1981 to 1989, details the British daily The Guardian. According to Amnesty International, around 4,500 people died in the summer of 1988 alone, including many young people and members of left-wing groups, as Ebrahim Raeesi, the current Iranian president and then head of the judiciary, published in an article on November 17.
Amnesty recalls that the regime executes more convicts than any other country except China. Even before the protests began, the number of executions in Iran had passed the 400 mark for the first time in five years, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
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