Rights groups urge Iran to halt executions

Iran’s judiciary should stop the executions of four members of Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority because of severe violations of legal process, Amnesty International, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and Human Rights Watch said today. The human rights groups said the Iranian judiciary should order a new trial according to international fair trial standards in which the death penalty is not an option.  Family members and Ahwazi Arab rights activists have told human rights groups that the detainees contacted their families on July 16 and said they feared that authorities were planning to carry out the execution orders any day now. According to information gathered by the rights groups, authorities kept the defendants, including three others who have received prison sentences, in solitary confinement for months. The authorities have also allegedly denied them access to a lawyer. “The absence of lawyers at key stages in the proceedings and the credible allegations of coerced “confessions” cast strong doubts on the legitimacy of the Ahwazi Arabs’ trial, let alone the death sentences,” said Tamara Alrifai, Middle East advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The fact that the government has an appalling rights record against Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority only makes the case for the need for a fair trial stronger.” The court sentenced Ghazi Abbasi, Abdul-Reza Amir-Khanafereh, Abdul-Amir Mojaddami, and Jasim Moghaddam Payam to death for the vaguely defined crime of moharebeh (“enmity against God”) and ifsad fil-arz (“corruption on earth”). The charges are allegedly related to a series of shootings that led to the death of a police officer and a soldier. The court sentenced three other defendants --Shahab Abbasi, Sami Jadmavinejad, and Hadi Albokhanfarnejad -- to three years in prison in the northwestern city of Ardebil for lower-level involvement in the shootings. The lower court issued its judgment a week after a trial that lasted approximately two hours, said letters to Ahwazi Arab rights groups written by the defendants Iranian Security and intelligence forces have targeted Arab activists since April 2005 after reports that the government planned to disperse Ahwazi Arabs from the area and to attempt to make them to lose their identity as “Ahwazi Arabs.” Rights groups accuse Iranian authorities of executing dozens of people since the disputed 2009 presidential election, many of them from ethnic minorities, for alleged ties to armed or “terrorist” groups.