Iran Criticized for Executing Drug Offenders

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/world/middleeast/iran-criticized-for-executing-drug-offenders.html

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Six international human rights groups have petitioned the United Nations to freeze its counternarcotics aid to Iran until that country abolishes the death penalty for drug offenses.

In a jointly signed Dec. 12 letter released Wednesday by the groups, they argue that the freeze is justified because of “the widening gulf between Iran’s rhetoric and the realities of the justice system.”

Iran executes more prisoners than any other country except China, with 500 to 625 executed last year, according to United Nations estimates. At least half of the condemned were convicted of drug trafficking.

Yury Fedotov, chief executive of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a Vienna-based agency that has provided millions of dollars to Iran’s counternarcotics efforts, has been in discussions with Iranian officials about the executions, which are at odds with the agency’s human rights guidelines.

Under international law, Iran and other countries with the death penalty are required to impose it only for the “most serious crimes,” which do not include drug offenses.

Even though some senior Iranian officials have spoken out against capital punishment for drug crimes, there have been signs that the pace of executions has accelerated this year.

Iran, a conduit for opium trafficking from neighboring Afghanistan, has one of the world’s harshest drug laws. It imposes mandatory death sentences for making, trafficking and possessing specified quantities of opium, opiates and other drugs, like methamphetamines.

On Dec. 4, Mohammad Javad Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Human Rights Council, said in an interview with the France 24 news channel that “nobody is happy” about the number of executions and that he would like to see Iran’s drug punishment softened. “We are crusading to change this law,” he said.

Rights groups say in their letter, which is addressed to Mr. Fedotov, that a few days before Mr. Larijani’s interview, 18 convicted offenders had been hanged in Iran, and that this year at least 318 had been put to death, a pace that would surpass the 331 drug convicts executed in 2013.

“This increase in the execution rate belies Mr. Larijani’s reassuring rhetoric and U.N.O.D.C.’s lauding of ‘potentially favorable developments’ on this issue,” reads the letter by the groups.

The letter was signed by Human Rights Watch, Reprieve, Iran Human Rights, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Harm Reduction International and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, named after an Iranian lawyer who was assassinated in Paris in 1991.

There was no immediate comment from Mr. Fedotov’s office about the letter. Phone and email messages left with the agency’s spokeswoman, Preeta Bannerjee, were not immediately returned.

Iran has given mixed messages on capital punishment.

When the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, criticized Iran in March for what he called its failure to improve human rights — including the use of capital punishment — Mr. Larijani’s brother, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, the chief of the Iranian judiciary, chastised him for the remarks.