Iranians Launch Twitter Campaign For Activist In Solitary Confinement
Twitter users have started a campaign to protest the detention of Iranian rights activist Narges Mohammadi as she is being held in solitary confinement for 42 days.
Twitter users have started a campaign to protest the detention of Iranian rights activist Narges Mohammadi as she is being held in solitary confinement for 42 days.
Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, said in a tweetthat she is being interrogated since November 24, adding that espionage for Saudi Arabia has been added to her charges.
Mohammadi, who has been arrested several times in the past, was detained again in mid-November this year at the death anniversary of a citizen, Ebrahim Ketabdar, who was shot dead by security forces during the November 2019 protests.
Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin Prison in September 2020 after serving five and half years on trumped up charges, without due process of law.
She was detained twice before this year, once for participating in a rally in front of the interior ministry during week-long water protests in Khuzestan and again at an anti-Taliban rally outside the Pakistan embassy in Tehran in September. She was freed both times after a few hours.
In March, the chairman of Amnesty International in Norway announced that two members of the Norwegian parliament have nominated the Iranian human rights activist for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharibabadi, made the remarks in reaction to a recent human rights resolution passed by United Nations General Assembly condemning the "alarmingly frequent" use of capital punishment, including against juvenile offenders, torture, and arbitrary arrests in Iran.
Gharibabadi, a former ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, said the executions of juveniles do not violate human rights, underlining that there is no compulsory international law prohibiting the practice.
Although no official data about the number of Iranian children in death row is publicly available, the UN has criticized Iran as one of the most prolific executioner of juveniles in the world, with some reports putting the numbers at about 100 a year on average.
“There are currently over 85 juvenile offenders on death row in Iran, sentenced to death following processes that significantly violate international human rights law. The majority of those sentenced to death are from marginalized groups or are individuals who themselves have been victims of abuse”, read part of a November statement by the Office of the High Commissioner for UN Human Rights.
UN human rights experts issued the statement to condemn the execution of Arman Abdolali, who was convicted for an alleged murder committed when he was 17. Arman was executed at dawn on November 24 after being transferred to solitary confinement the previous evening.
While the death penalty is not officially banned by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) or virtually any other universal treaty, there are several instruments in force to push states to abolish capital punishment, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based non-profit organization that focuses on disseminating studies and reports on the capital punishment.
The ICCPR -- one of the three international treaties collectively referred to as the International Bill of Human Rights — mandates that the death penalty “shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.”
In most countries a minor is defined as a person under the age of majority – generally 18 -- which legally demarcates childhood from adulthood. Adulthood in the Islamic law (or Sharia) is the time when someone reaches puberty or maturity. According to Sharia, people are considered innocent before that and don’t have full responsibility and Islamic law is not applied to them. However, the concept of minor is not clearly defined and differs based on the interpretation of different Islamic jurists.
