Abu Dhabi: Iran’s Supreme Court has annulled a death sentence issued against a prisoner, 10 months after the inmate was hanged in Urmia prison in the west of the country, human rights groups said.
The prisoner, Khidir Gui Del, was hanged last September, after being convicted of drug dealing charges in 2013.
Human rights organisations said the death sentence was carried out while the lawsuit was underway in the Iranian Supreme Court, which did not issue a veto against the death sentence until after its implementation, according to Sky News Arabia.
This strange incident sheds light once again on the phenomenal number of executions in Iran, which is believed to execute the most people per capita. Iran insists that the execution numbers human rights groups allege are “exaggerated,” and that executions are only carried out “after a lengthy judicial process.”
According to reports of rights organisations, over the past two decades, more than 8,000 executions have been carried out inside Iranian prisons, or in public squares.
Iranian human rights activist Shahpour Azad told Sky News Arabia: “The story of this young man whose execution decision was overturned by the court about a year after its implementation, sums up the depth and gravity of the tragedy.”
He added: “This bloody regime contradicts even its laws, in the context of its quest to satisfy its hunger for murder, execution, taking innocent lives and imposing its dominance over society.”
Iranian activist, Faryal Moeini, told Sky News Arabia: “Execution is at the core of the Iranian regime’s methodology, and it is a ruling philosophy and a method of extending absolute control, which explains its extensive application of this punishment, as it is one of its most important authoritarian weapons to spread terror and fear among people, and ensuring its survival.”
According to Amnesty International’s report on executions in the world for the year 2020, Iran was the only country that executed children, and that it alone carried out half the number of executions internationally.
According to the report, at least three under-18s were executed in Iran last year, and their execution was in contravention of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Amnesty International says that one of the three, who was executed in Saqqaz City Prison in April 2020, was mentally disabled.
