lenusmaria

Iran has hanged a man for a murder committed at the age of 15, a report on Wednesday said, the second execution in a week that violated international rights conventions.

Behnam Zaree, 18, was executed in prison in the southern city of Shiraz on Tuesday for murdering a fellow teenager identified only by his first name Mehrdad in a streetfight three years ago, a daily reported.

Zaree had told the court that he did not mean to kill Mehrdad and asked for his family's forgiveness, the paper said.

Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose signatories commit not to execute convicts who were under the age of 18 at the time of an offence.

But on August 19, Iran hanged Reza Hejazi, 20, in the central city of Isfahan for stabbing a man to death in a fight when he was 15.

The conservative judiciary maintains that minors are not executed in Iran, but 17-year-old Mohammad Hassanzadeh was hanged in the western city of Sanandaj in June.

The European Union and international human rights groups have sought to raise the age of legal responsibility in Iran's Islamic law, which deems a boy punishable from the age of 15 and a girl from the age of nine.

According to reports by the human rights group of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, at least nine people were executed for crimes they committed as minors in the past Iranian year to March 2008, and 73 such offenders remain on death row.

hass

Ironically, until 2005, the world's leader in juvenile offender executions was...not Iran, not China, but the USA.
Juvenile executions were banned by the US Supreme Court in a narrow 5-to-4 decision in 2005. At that time, there were 78 juvenile offenders on death row in the USA.

Zubi-ondo

Iran is currently legislating a law that makes "leaving" Islam punishable by death. The reason I put quotes around "leaving" is because A) They've been doing this for years without legislation, this is just an attempt to make it official. B) They will take your possessions, burn down your house, and/or kill you anyway if even if you were never Muslim to begin with.

the ace

On the other hand, Mehrdad is just as dead. If you have the death penalty for murder, there's no point in pretending otherwise.

At least corpses don't re-offend.

I don't like the idea of killing people but when the alternative is a token sentence and the offender hurting someone else within days of release, you begin to wonder.

While I'm uncomfortable with the entire affair, it makes sense that punishment should be strict enough to make the offender think twice about repeating his actions, something sadly lacking, certainly in the UK.