IRAN - Sajad Sanjari

IRAN - Sajad (Sajjad) Sanjari, a minor, executed in Dizelabad prison on August 2

August 2, 2021:

Sajad (Sajjad) Sanjari, a minor, executed in Dizelabad prison on August 2. Iranian authorities have secretly executed a young man who was a child at the time of his arrest and had spent nearly a decade on death row, Amnesty International has learned. Sajad Sanjari was hanged in Dizelabad prison in Kermanshah province at dawn on 2 August, but his family were not told until a prison official asked them to collect his body later that day. Sajad Sanjari was born on 19 July 1995 and was arrested for the fatal stabbing on 2 August 2010, making him just 15 years old at the time of the crime. His funeral was held on August 3 after his body was released to his family. Speaking to IHR, one of his relative said: “The victim was a year older than Sajad and had tried to rape him.” Sajad Sanjari claimed he had acted in self-defence, but in 2012 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.  Sajad Sanjari was first convicted and sentenced to death in January 2012. During his trial he admitted stabbing the deceased but said he had done so in self-defence after the man tried to rape him. He said the man had threatened to attack him the previous day, so he carried a kitchen knife to scare him away.  The trial court rejected Sajad Sanjari’s self-defence claims after several witnesses attested to the deceased’s good character. The court added that Sajad Sanjari could not argue self-defence because he was warned ahead of time and therefore had ample time to raise the matter with the authorities or seek help from residents of his village. The conviction and death sentence were initially rejected by the Supreme Court in December 2012, due to various flaws in the investigation process, but were eventually upheld in February 2014. Sajad Sanjari was granted a retrial in June 2015 after new juvenile sentencing guidelines were introduced in the 2013 Islamic Penal Code, granting judges discretion to replace the death penalty with an alternative punishment if they determine that children had not understood the nature of the crime or its consequences, or there were doubts about their “mental growth and maturity” at the time of the crime. However, a criminal court in Kermanshah province re-resentenced Sajad Sanjari to death on 21 November 2015 after concluding, without any explanation, that he had attained “maturity” at the time of the crime. In reaching this conclusion, the court did not refer Sajad Sanjari to the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran, a state forensic institute, for an assessment and dismissed the opinion of an official court advisor with expertise in child psychology that Sajad Sanjari had not attained maturity at the time of the crime. During his first trial in 2012, the court had found that he had reached “maturity” at 15 on the basis of his “pubic hair development”. The sentence was subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court and a later request for retrial was denied. In January 2017, the Iranian authorities halted Sajad Sanjari’s scheduled execution, following an international outcry.

https://english.shabtabnews.com/2021/08/04/iran-secret-execution-of-young-man-arrested-at-15-a-cruel-assault-on-child-rights/

https://iranhr.net/en/articles/4848/

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/08/iran-secret-execution-of-young-man-arrested-at-15-a-cruel-assault-on-child-rights/

https://iran-hrm.com/2021/08/05/iran-secretly-executes-young-man-arrested-at-15/