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| Public hanging in Iran |
(New York)- United Nations agencies and international donors should immediately freeze financial and other assistance to Iran’s drug control programs, Human Rights Watch and Harm Reduction International (HRI) said today. The funding contributes to abusive prosecutions of drug suspects, the groups said.
Iran’s judicial and legal system systematically violates the human rights of accused drug offenders, in particular their right to a fair trial, resulting in numerous death sentences in violation of international law, Human Rights Watch and HRI said. The donors should audit the human rights impacts of their projects and not resume any assistance until satisfied that Iran has ended the persistent violation of the rights of drug suspects in its criminal justice system, including abolishing the death penalty for drug offenders.
“Donors are effectively supporting prosecutions in a judicial and legal system that they themselves regard as unjust,” said Rebecca Schleifer, advocacy director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “Draconian laws, secret trials, no appeals, and death sentences for possession of small amounts of drugs should warn off any donor that wants to do the right thing.”
UN agencies and international donors have in the past decade provided millions of dollars of financial and technical assistance to support drug control efforts in Iran or to programs in neighboring countries that affect enforcement capacity in Iran, according to information collected by HRI. The stated purpose of these drug enforcement programs is to reduce crime and human suffering by reducing the supply and demand of illicit drugs.
“In reality, Iran’s drug enforcement programs increase its capacity to arrest alleged drug offenders,” said Schleifer. “They make it easier to prosecute alleged offenders based on unfair trials, and even apply the death sentence under the draconian drug laws of Iran’s revolutionary courts.”
The problem is made worse by laws, policies, and practices regulating drug offenses. Iran’s anti-narcotics law imposes mandatory death sentences for possession and trafficking of small amounts of illicit drugs, tries alleged drug offenders behind closed doors in revolutionary courts where they are regularly denied their due process rights, and severely restricts their right to appeal even in cases where the punishment is death.
The number of people executed by Iranian authorities for drug-related offenses has risen sharply over the last few years. In 2011, Iran executed at least 600 people, second only to China. Eighty-one percent of these executions were for drug-related crimes, including for personal use. According to Amnesty International, in 2009, of the 389 executions recorded, 166- almost 43 percent- were drug-related. In 2010 about 68 percent of all executions recorded by the organization- 172 of the 253 known executions- were for drug-related offenses.
Source: Payvand Iran News, Human Rights Watch, August 22, 2012
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