Rights group condemns Iran hanging of 20 Sunnis

HUMAN Rights Watch has denounced Iran’s hanging of 20 Sunni prisoners in one of its biggest mass executions in years as a “shameful low point in its human rights record”.
Shia-majority Iran last week said it had hanged 20 “terrorist” Sunni prisoners on Tuesday convicted of carrying out a string of attacks against civilians and religious leaders in the country’s western Kurdish region, Al Jazeera reported.
“Iran’s mass execution of prisoners on August 2 at Rajai Shahr prison is a shameful low point in its human rights record,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at HRW, said on Monday.
“With at least 230 executions since January 1, Iran is yet again the regional leader in executions but a laggard in implementing the so far illusory penal code reforms meant to bridge the gap with international standards,” she said.
The New York-based rights group said “two lawyers who represented some of the men told (it) that their clients did not get a fair trial and that their due process rights had been violated”.
It said rights groups believed the 20 were among 33 Sunni men, including possibly a minor, arrested in 2009 and 2010 and convicted of “enmity against God”.
HRW said that recent changes to Iran’s penal code required the judiciary to review and annul death sentences of people on that charge “if they had not personally used weapons in committing the crime”.
Iran regularly hangs large-scale drug traffickers. Murder, rape, armed robbery and adultery are also capital offences in the Islamic republic.
Those charged with “spreading corruption on Earth” and “enmity against God” can also be sentenced to death under Islamic sharia law, which has been in force in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
According to rights group Amnesty International, Iran was one of the world’s top executioners in 2015 when it put 977 people to death, mostly on drug trafficking charges.