10 October 2017 :
October 10 is the World Day Against the Death Penalty and Hands Off Cain dedicates it to Iran, the country that continues to record the largest number of per capita executions in the world.
According to Human Rights Monitor, there were at least 456 executions in 2017, including those of 12 women and 4 juvenile offenders, while the total of executions carried out under the Rouhani Presidency from August 2013 to September 2017, has reached the impressive figure of 3,111 executions.
For Rouhani, these executions are "based on divine laws or rules approved by Parliament," of which he feels mere actuator.
People are sent to the scaffold especially for drug-related crimes: there were 238 executions in 2017 for nonviolent drug-related offenses and despite the Parliament's decision to abolish it for most of these cases, the law is still under scrutiny of the Council of Guardians on which the entry into force depends.
Hanging is the preferred method by which Sharia is applied in Iran, and public executions continued in 2017 with at least 25 people who were hanged on the public square.
But in Iran is the whole system of human rights promotion and protection to be rejected by the theocratic regime: according to the dictates of Iranian Sharia, there are also tortures, amputations of the arts, harassment and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments. These are not isolated cases and are in open contravention of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Iran has ratified, that prohibits these practices.
To understand the nature of this bloody regime, it is important to know the line of continuity that binds top institutional figures of the current government with the deaths of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, a massacre referred to by the recent report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that the regime itself has recently admitted to having done so.
Indeed, Rouhani wanted as Minister of Justice in his first term Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, a member of the “Death Commission” of Tehran and now, in his second term, Alireza Avaie, another responsible for that massacre in the province of Khuzestan and subjected from the European Union to sanctions for the human rights violations that it has been responsible for.
"The silence of the international community on all this encourages the Iranian regime to continue in executions as in violating international human rights standards," said Sergio D'Elia and Elisabetta Zamparutti, respectively Secretary and Treasurer of Hands Off Cain.
"That is why it is important that the UN General Assembly, which is under way in New York, sets up an International Inquiry Commission on the 1988 massacre and reiterates the request of a moratorium with a view to abolishing the death penalty. The issue of the death penalty and more generally of the respect of human rights should be at the center of any agreement and meeting both multilateral and bilateral with representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran, starting with its President Rouhani."
