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May 29th,
2009 - Debate Over Child Executions Roils Iran’s Presidential Vote Feature article from Wall Street
Journal The
War Profiteers Blog - “The Islamic nation of Iran proved …” |
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Debate Over Child Executions
Roils Iran’s Presidential Vote By Farnaz Fassihi Wall Street Journal May 29, 2009 Tehran, Iran - The day
before two of his young clients were to be hanged, lawyer Mohamad Mostafaei
went to a Justice Ministry office here to request a stay of execution. Mr. Mostafaei's errand
should have been routine, if solemn: He represents 30 of the 135 criminals
under the age of 18 on Iran's death row. Instead, he says, he was detained
and grilled for an hour and a half, part of Iran's widening crackdown on
human-rights activists. "Anything can happen to
you at any time," said Mr. Mostafaei, 34 years old. A Justice Ministry
spokesman said the mid-May incident wasn't a detention, and that Mr.
Mostafaei was merely asked the purpose of his visit. As Iranians prepare to elect
their next president on June 12, a range of civil-liberties issues - from
juvenile executions to the freedom to blog - have become hot topics. Ending a
period of relative openness, the government has pursued a clampdown on dissidents,
human-rights activists, journalists and students, the likes of which hasn't
been seen here in decades. The crackdown is led by
conservative lawmakers who rose to power in recent years. Analysts say Iran's
regime tends to view dissent as a national-security risk and a departure from
the ideals of Iran's Islamic revolution of the 1970s under Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini. In June's vote, all three of
the major candidates seeking to unseat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - two
reformists, and one conservative - have criticized his government for its
lack of tolerance. Each has promised more personal and social freedom if
elected. Iran's use of the death
penalty in juvenile cases has become particularly controversial, largely due
to efforts by Mr. Mostafaei. The past two years, Iran led the world with a
total of 28 hangings of youth offenders. Iran's constitution stipulates that
the age of maturity for boys is 15, and for girls, 9 - the ages at which
Islamic law calls for children to take on religious duties such as prayer and
fasting. (Executions aren't carried out until the person reaches 18.) Some other Islamic countries
also have juveniles on death row, but executions are rarer. According to
Human Rights Watch, since January 2005, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and
Yemen have carried out a total of six juvenile executions. In some U.S. states, death
penalties for crimes committed by juveniles over the age of 15 remained legal
until 2005, when the Supreme Court said the punishment should be reserved for
individuals who had committed their crimes after reaching the age of 18. That
ruling ended a 29-year era in which the U.S. executed 22 people for crimes
committed as juveniles. Iran's Parliament, under
intense pressure from local activists and international human-rights groups
alike, recently approved legislation to make it tougher - although not
impossible in murder cases - to sentence juveniles to death. "The issue of juvenile
executions has preoccupied us. We are not indifferent to world public opinion
about this matter, and we are trying to find a solution," said Ali
Shahrokhi, a cleric and lawmaker who heads the Parliament's judiciary
committee. The legislation, must still
win the approval of the Guardian Council, a conservative committee of clerics,
to become law. Mr. Mostafaei and others
want Iran to ban juvenile executions altogether by changing the age of
maturity to 18, where it stood before the 1979 Islamic revolution. Earlier this month, one
prominent presidential candidate who is also a cleric, Mehdi Karroubi,
denounced child executions and said he would end them if elected. The next
day, the conservative newspaper Kayhan called Mr. Karroubi an agent for
Zionists. "The intimidations
won't stop us from doing what we believe is right," said Mr. Mostafaei.
The day after his run-in with authorities earlier this month - with his two
clients scheduled to be hanged at dawn - Mr. Mostafaei gathered several dozen
protesters at 4 a.m. near the execution grounds, shouting the names of Muslim
saints and calling for an end to child executions. Just minutes before sunrise,
prison officials announced a six-month stay of execution. His two clients,
both convicted of murder in their teens, remain alive, for now. However, their stay of
execution isn't much of a guarantee. Earlier this month another of Mr.
Mostafaei's clients, a young woman named Delara Darabi, was hanged in
violation of a two-month stay she had obtained. Word of Ms. Darabi's fate
came when the executioner let her phone her family. "Oh mother, I see
the hangman's noose in front of me," she said, according to Mr.
Mostafaei. At age 17, Ms. Darabi had confessed to a murder that took place in
a jewelry heist, but later said her boyfriend was the killer and that she
took the blame to protect him. Human-rights activists have
long complained that Iran has curbed civil liberties. In the past few years,
reform-minded newspapers and magazines have been shut one by one. In May, one
such paper published by another presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi,
lived for only one day before a court ordered it to shut. Movies and books go through
rigorous layers of censorship. Art galleries must seek approval for every
item to be displayed. Restrictions like these were put in place or expanded
over the past four years during Mr. Ahmadinejad's tenure. Mr. Ahmadinejad dismisses
claims that human rights have deteriorated. "I have not been informed
that anybody has spent time in prison for criticizing the president, who is
the No. 1 executive of the country, after all, or has been subjected to
persecution of any sort. It's really very free," he said last September
at a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly. The president's office
hasn't responded to interview requests from The Wall Street Journal. As recently as five years
ago, under President Mohammad Khatami, Iran was relatively progressive in the
Islamic world, as embodied in its expanding array of human-rights groups,
charities and other so-called nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Between
1997 and 2005, as many as 7,000 such domestic groups worked in areas as
diverse as women's issues, children's cancer, transvestites' rights and
environmental policy. When Mr. Ahmadinejad came to
power in 2005, he set out to limit their activity. The Ministry of Interior
created a special office to supervise them. The government also set new
restrictions on United Nations activities regarding NGOs, requiring them to
work only with groups recommended by the government. In interviews, nearly
two-dozen NGOs said they must now get the government's OK for every activity,
from naming board members to holding fund-raisers. "The regime has made it
clear that it does not like NGOs and it's very afraid of us," said Shirin
Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient whose own organization, Iran's Center
for the Defense of Human Rights, was shut down in January. The government believes some
NGOs are fronts for foreign spies. In January, Iranian intelligence officials
said they uncovered a coup plot involving the Central Intelligence Agency and
a local AIDS charity. Tehran suspects the U.S. is
trying to stir up a "velvet revolution" - a peaceful uprising like
the one that overturned communism in the Czech Republic two decades ago. It
cites Congress's 2006 decision to allocate $75 million toward social programs
in Iran. "Our enemies have officially announced that they want to
infiltrate our civil society and have even declared a budget for their
plans," said Ali Fouladi, who heads the Interior Ministry's department
for monitoring NGOs. "We will outsmart them." The U.S. and other countries
have denied that they aim to overthrow the government. "Yes, we support
reform and defend human rights, but there's a world of difference between
that and trying to start a revolution here," said a senior Western
diplomat in Tehran. Mr. Mostafaei began his
human-rights advocacy by volunteering with Rahi, an NGO that doled out free
legal advice to women prisoners. He sought clients by reading crime stories
in local papers. Today he runs a private law
practice. Along a narrow, tree-lined street in central Tehran, a bronze
plaque with the words "The Protectors" marks his office. "We defend and protect
victims whom the law does not protect," he said recently, sitting at his
desk there. The walls are decorated with artwork by death-row clients
including Ms. Darabi, the woman executed earlier this month. One of her oil
paintings hangs above a fireplace, depicting an old man with a violin. Mr. Mostafaei's reputation
grew after he won a case five years ago involving a teenage girl, Nazanin
Fatehi, who faced execution for stabbing and killing a man who she said was
trying to rape her. Nazanin was 15 years old at the time of the stabbing. After Mr. Mostafaei won her
release, parents of other death-row children sought him out. He is both
attorney and therapist, of sorts. During a recent interview, his phone rang -
it was the mother of a client. "It's OK. Don't cry," he says.
"You have to be strong." He tells her he saw her son that morning. Mr. Mostafaei grew up in a
poor family with five siblings and a father who forced the children to take
jobs. In elementary school, he said, he worked at a brick factory. "I'm mostly seeking
justice for children because I suffered so much as a child," he said. As a young man, he took
Iran's national university entrance exam, and ranked in the top 50. He ended
up at the prestigious Tehran University Law School. His budding law career
coincided with Iran's reform years, a period starting in late 1997 when
politicians moved away from the strict ideology rooted in Ayatollah
Khomeini's 1970s Islamic revolution. The clampdown began more
recently. In March 2007, Rahi, the NGO where Mr. Mostafaei volunteered, was
shuttered by Iran's Revolutionary Court, which deals with national-security
matters. Rahi's founder, lawyer Shadi Sadr, was put in solitary confinement
for two weeks and charged with conspiring to overthrow the Iranian leadership
with foreign funds via a "velvet revolution." Ms. Sadr is awaiting
trial on bail. Other NGOs also say they
have come under pressure. The president of Mahak, a widely known Iranian NGO
that helps children with cancer, said security forces last year conducted an
unannounced audit of its financial records. "These are the darkest
days for NGOs," said Zahra Eshraghi, who runs a women's organization
that she says was instructed several years ago to avoid advocacy work by the
Interior Ministry. Ms. Eshraghi is also the granddaughter of Ayatollah
Khomeini. As for Mr. Mostafaei, he is
responding to the pressure with unconventional means of advocacy. He
recruited Iranian movie stars to campaign for his cause, although in November
the judiciary subpoenaed the stars and warned them to stay away from publicly
campaigning against juvenile executions. He also runs a blog that
tracks human-rights cases. And this past summer, Mr. Mostafaei made a
documentary about juveniles on death row. The film opens with the voice of
Behnam Zareh, a former client of his, who was convicted of murder at age 15
after killing another boy in a fight over a bird. "I want to stay alive.
Please, please I want to stay alive," the young man says. The recording
is his final phone conversation with Mr. Mostafaei before being hanged last
August. Copyright 2009 Dow Jones
& Company, Inc. External link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124355320443064445.html |