Irwin Cotler: Iran’s execution binge

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While the eyes of the world are understandably turned toward North Africa, Iranian executions have escalated dramatically. Human rights organizations report that in January 2011 alone, Iran has executed at least 65 people, while another 43 executions took place in the 10 days before the new year. This is a rate of about one person every eight hours, an unprecedented “execution binge” even by wanton Iranian standards. It has gone largely unnoticed.

This past weekend, The Netherlands froze its ties with Iran to protest the hanging of a Dutch-Iranian woman, Zahara Bahrami. She had been executed on trumped-up drug charges, but her real “crime” had been to protest the fraudulent June 2009 election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Her execution came just after the hanging of two other post-election demonstrators in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, and the sentencing of seven other protesters to death.

Iran is engaged in a wholesale assault on the rights of its own people, including a state-orchestrated wave of arrests, detentions, beatings, torture, kidnappings, disappearances and executions. Initially, all of this was overlaid with Stalinist show trials and coerced confessions; but now, even that pretense has been discarded.

The campaign has included a widespread and systematic assault on women’s rights, the oppression of religious and ethnic minorities, especially the Baha’i and Kurds, the imprisonment and murder of political dissidents and the criminalization of freedom of speech, assembly and association– including assaults on students, professors, activists and intellectuals.

Iran has imprisoned more journalists than any other country in the world; and now also leads the world in per capita executions, including the execution of children. The government also has targeted labour rights, and has imprisoned and even murdered the lawyers who defend the accused. All told, Iran’s government’s actions constitute crimes against humanity under international law.

The pattern of targeting political prisoners — particularly of the Kurdish minority — began last May with the execution of five Kurds, including Farzad Kamangar, a 34-year-old teacher and social worker. Kamangar initially was held incommunicado for seven months, and charged with moharebeh ( “warring against God”). He was convicted and sentenced to death

after a seven-minute trial in which no evidence was presented, the accused and his lawyer were unable to speak.

Kamangar’s lawyer, Kalil Bahrmian, said he was “shocked” by this sudden execution, as even the judicial authorities themselves had told him and his client that the charges were groundless. As Aaron Rhodes, Executive Director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran put it at the time, “These secret executions are, in reality, nothing more than state-sanctioned murders.”

In the latest executions this month of Kurdish political prisoners Jafar Kazemi and Mohammad Ali Haji Aghaee — once again for the crime of moharebeh, and once again without evidence — their lawyers and families were not even notified. Kazemi’s wife revealed that her husband had been tortured on pain of confession to false charges, which he refused to do. The absurdity of the charges were exposed by the fact that Kazemi was accused of planning, organizing and participating in a massive protest, though he had been arrested months before and was in jail at the time of the alleged offence.

Draconian and cruel punishments such as stoning, flogging and amputation are not only sanctioned under Iranian law, but ordered. While the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani — the mother of two sentenced to death by stoning for adultery and even murder without any due process — was much publicized worldwide, and resulted in her stoning being suspended, she remains at risk of imprisonment and execution through other means, and has recently been accused of “confessing to her crime.” (It should be noted that stonings were upheld by the Iranian Supreme Court as punishment for a woman convicted of adultery in November 2008.)

Although the international community has moved to sanction the Iranian nuclear threat, it must also sanction the massive domestic repression lest the ignoring of such state-sanctioned assaults on the rights of the Iranian people serve to encourage even more brutality.

The video of an innocent young woman named Neda–gunned down in 2009 while protesting the fraudulent election of President Ahmadinejad — went viral in the immediate aftermath of her murder. But there are many more Nedas out there. Their unconscionable murder goes unredressed. It is our responsibility to sound the alarm and stand in solidarity with the struggle for human rights in Iran.

-Irwin Cotler is the Member of Parliament for Mount Royal and the former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada. He is the Chair of the International Responsibility to Prevent Coalition.

Irwin Cotler: Iran’s execution binge

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