Iran carried out on Thursday (8) the first death sentence against a participant in the wave of protests that spread across the country for almost three months.
According to the semi-official Tasnim news agency, a man identified as Mohsen Shekari was killed by hanging. He had been convicted of wounding a security agent with a knife and blocking a street in Tehran with his motorcycle during one of the demonstrations.
Iranian state media published a video of Shekari’s alleged confession. In the images, he appears with a bruise on his face and admits to having attacked a member of the Basij, a militia linked to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran. Human rights groups claim that Shekari was tortured and forced to confess to the alleged crimes.
Death sentences make up one of the faces of the Iranian regime’s repression of the series of demonstrations. Earlier in the week, the Revolutionary Guard urged the judiciary to issue swift rulings against those accused of “crimes against the security of the nation and Islam”.
Amnesty International’s survey counts at least 21 people who received death sentences in the wake of the protests. For the entity, they are “false judgments intended to intimidate participants in the popular uprising that shook Iran”.
“Iranian authorities must immediately overturn all death sentences, refrain from seeking the imposition of the death penalty and drop all charges against those arrested in connection with their peaceful participation in protests,” the NGO said in a statement.
Western countries have also spoken out, condemning the execution. German diplomacy released a note in which it states that “the regime’s contempt [iraniano] for humanity knows no bounds”. Austria called the execution inhumane, France expressed the “strongest condemnation” of the act, and the UK said it was outraged.
The biggest wave of protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution was triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in September in custody of the moral police, responsible for enforcing the regime’s strict religious codes of conduct. Amini was arrested for allegedly incorrectly wearing the hijab, the Islamic headscarf. The official version is that she died as a result of previous health problems, but family members and activists claim that she was attacked and killed by agents while she was arrested.
Even before the Mahsa Amini protests, the number of executions was already rising in Iran. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said that the country exceeded the figure of 400 deaths in 2022, a mark reached for the first time in five years.
One of the most notorious cases was the conviction of two Iranian lesbian activists for “promoting homosexuality”, considered the first time that women have been sentenced to death in Iran because of their sexual orientation. They were convicted of “spreading corruption on Earth” – the sentence is commonly given to defendants found to be violators of sharia, Islamic law, and is the most serious charge in the Iranian Penal Code.
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