21. July 2005

IRAN

öffentliche hinrichtung von zwei jugendlichen in der stadt mashhad.die offizielle version ist das die beiden einen 13jährigen vergewaltigt haben sollen, andere quellen behaupten das urteil sei begründet mit homosexualität .

Report: Iran Gay Teens Executed

Two teenagers have been executed after a religious court found them them guilty of homosexuality according to pro-Democracy groups.The Iranian Students News Agency reports that the executions took place on July 19 in the northeastern city of Mashhad.

One teen, ISNA says was 18, the other was a minor, believed to be 16 or 17. The organization ran a picture of what it said was the execution on its Web site.The English language Iran In Focus also reported the executions, saying the teens were hanged in public in the city square. It quotes sources as saying the teens were executed for having sex with another minor but this could not be confirmed. The report does not name the victim. Under Sharia law the victim of a sexual assault must also be executed.

Both news services say that prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months, severely beaten and given the lash 228 times.A report of the executions was also carried on the website of the respected democratic opposition movement, The National Council of Resistance Of Iran.Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer for the younger teen reportedly had appealed the death sentence but the Supreme Court in Tehran ordered him to be hanged.

Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.Three other young gay Iranians are reportedly being hunted by police, but they are said to have gone into hiding and cannot be found. If caught, they would also face execution.The British LGBT rights group OutRage has called for sanctions against Iran. The organization has called for western states to break off diplomatic relations, impose trade sanctions and treat Iran as "a pariah state".

"This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran," said OutRage spokesperson Peter Tatchell."The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder."According to Iranian human rights campaigners, over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979," said Tatchell.Iran In Focus reports that members of Iran's parliament are applauding the court for carrying out the death sentence on the teens.

"These individuals were corrupt. Their sentence was carried out with the approval of the judiciary and it served them right,"the publication quotes Ali Asgari, a member of the Majlis Party Legal Affairs Committee.At least three men have been sentenced over the past month to death by stoning in Nigeria which also follows Sharia law in several provinces.In March a gay couple was beheaded in a public execution in Saudi Arabia. The pair had been convicted of killing a blackmailer who had threatened to expose them to authorities. Hundreds of other gays have been rounded up by Saudi authorities in recent months.

[  365gay.com

Conflicting reports on execution ----Rights groups dispute claims 2 were hanged for being gay

A photo of 2 teenaged boys being hanged in Iran last week swept across the Internet with claims they were executed for being gay.The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay rights group, which has no position on the death penalty, fired off a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeating the allegations and urging her to intervene. The U.K.-based gay rights group Outrage and Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht also condemned the hangings.

But the circumstances that triggered the executions are now being questioned by several human rights groups, which claim the teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, may not have been killed for being gay.Research conducted by the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has found, so far, that the teenagers were convicted of and executed for raping a 13-year-old boy, a crime that occurred when they may have been minors. The human rights organizations have not yet uncovered evidence that the charges were trumped up, officials said. Asgari and Marhoni also reportedly received 228 lashings while in detention for drinking and theft.

The human rights groups note that Iran's execution and torture of the teenagers remains appalling, no matter the circumstances.Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Project, said the public hangings were a "horrific human rights violation." One of the boys was a minor when the alleged crime was committed. The International Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Iran is a signatory, forbids the execution of juveniles.

There is also uncertainty about the exact ages of Asgari and Marhoni, according to Long. Marhoni may have been 19, which means he was not a juvenile when the alleged crime was committed about 14 months ago, he said. Some news outlets reported that Asgari and Marhoni were 16 and 18 respectively when they were executed."We hope that the gay community won't simply turn away from it if it may not be a 'gay rights' case," Long said.

According to Human Rights Watch, local Iranian news reports tell a detailed story of the alleged crime, including interviews with the victim's father and a description of how the boy's bike was stolen before he was abducted and assaulted at knifepoint.It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Accounts of the executions on gay news Web sites referenced reports by the group and its English language news site, www.iranfocus.com.

"It was not a gay case," said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, which condemns capital punishment. "We would welcome HRC?s involvement in demanding that our government speak out on human rights violations. It was just the wrong case."Ettelbrick said she was also disturbed by the racially charged language used by some gay rights groups to condemn the execution, such as when Peter Tatchell of Outrage said in a statement, "This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran."HRC received their information on the executions in Iran primarily from Thursday and Friday news reports last week, according to HRC's Steven Fisher. An investigation to determine the truth is still needed, he said.

[  nyblade.com

IGLHRC Executive Director on the Iranian executions

Paula Ettelbrick, the Exeutive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, has issued the following letter regarding the reports about the hangings of 2 teenage boys in Iran.

Dear Friends:

How have we all gotten to a point of seeming to be at odds or in different "camps" about what did or did not happen in Iran regarding the execution of two young men? What happened is outrageous, no matter how we look at it - public executions, putting juveniles to death for any reason (which, by the way, the US Supreme Court only struck down this past term!! - god knows what will happen with John Roberts on the bench), executing anyone (women, gay people, children) because their sexuality, sexual desires, sexual activity, or gender are at odds with cultural norms developed to control us, or, in IGLHRC?s opinion, imposing a death penalty on anyone for any reason.

And, of course, it strikes a particular chord of outrage for us as people who are lesbian, gay, bi or trans - to think of our lives as so expendable and our sex so grotesque.

All of us share the view that the criminalization of consensual sexual conduct must end - everywhere. But what our community has not reached agreement on is that, in addition to the crime, we must also take a stand against the punishment - such as the death penalty. And to be effective in taking a stand against the punishment, we need to look beyond our own community and oppose the ways in which it as been used to control social norms and has been imposed primarily on society?s more fungible individuals - poor people, racial/ethnic/political minorities, women (married and unmarried), and LGBT people. For instance, in many parts of the world it is acceptable to put women to death for adultery, non-marital sex, and other sexual offences. If we cannot make the connections here, with women, who have spearheaded a large and vocal global movement opposing such practices, we will continue to simply shout into the wind with our outrage.

We are right to be highly skeptical about the facts as presented by conservative or government sources in Iran. We know, for instance, that freedom of the press is not exactly a value to the government of Iran. We also know all too well, from Iranian lesbian and gay people who are among us in many parts of the world, that the horrific treatment of homosexuality/gay/lesbian identity in Iran is legendary and extreme.

For years, IGLHRC has collected information about the conditions faced by LGBT people and people with HIV in 144 countries around the world, including Iran. Among our findings in Iran are:

- In April 1992, Dr. Ali Mozafarian, a Sunni Muslim leader in Fars province was executed in Shiraz. He was convicted of espionage, adultery and sodomy.

- On March 14, 1994, dissident writer Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani was charged with offences ranging from espionage to homosexual improprieties.

- On Novemer 12, 1995, Mehdi Barazandeh was condemned to death by the Supreme Court of Iran for repeated acts of adultery and the "obscene act of sodomy." The Court?s decree was carried out by stoning.

- In an article entitled "Muslim Intolerance," published in the French daily, Le Monde, on January 24, 2002, the author, Sahebjam Freidoune wrote: "Between March 2001 and December 2001, 12 men, aged between 15 and 57, have also been stoned for homosexuality and sodomy. These public executions from another era, in which each [spectator] throws his stone, have taken place particularly in Salmas, Mourchekhort, Sari, Touyserkan and Mirjaveh. Sixteen men were killed by stoning between March 2000 and March 2001, and ten between March 1999 and March 2000."

" On May 13, 2003, Agence France Presse quotes a judiciary official in an article entitled Iranian beheaded, 8 hanged in wave of executions: 'An Iranian was beheaded in public and 8 others hanged for offences ranging from rape and murder to kidnapping women and girls, homosexual acts, sodomy and fornication'"

Under the Islamic Penal Code adopted in Iran, lesbians fare no better, though documentation of punishments has not been as specific. Among other things the law provides, 'Punishment for lesbianism (Mosahqeh) is one hundred lashes for each party." If the act of lesbianism is repeated three times and punishment is enforced each time, [a] death sentence will be issued the fourth time - If 2 women not related by consanguinity stand naked under one cover without necessity, they will be punished to less than one hundred lashes.'

I could go on and on with stories, laws and practices in Iran that point to some of the most egregious human rights violations based on sexuality. The point here is that there is little doubt that assumptions about sexuality played a role in this. So where does that leave us?

Well, to some extent it is a question of how we can be most effective and heard. To this end, I offer a correction to the assertion by members of OUTRAGE! that I 'condemned' Peter Tatchell?s initial comment, "This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran." As I said, and the Washington Blade correctly quoted, I was disturbed (not "condemning") by what I interpreted as language having the potential to be racially/religiously charged. The US government has successfully whipped up so much anti-Muslim, anti-Arab hostility to justify it's war on Iraq, that people here actually think that bombing Iraq was just revenge for the World Trade Center destruction. In other words, we can't quite distinguish among people from the Middle East - or the rest of the world for that matter - and are led to think of all of them as enemies, just at a time when the most important thing we can do is to engage with Iranians who are committed to human rights - both LGBT and non-LGBT.

Second, it's interesting that this case has suddenly drawn such a rapid and strong response when these abuses have been going on for years without a peep from US-based LGBT groups. Why now? Why just Iran? There's no doubt that we should be demanding answers to what has happened, and continuing to get information about what many of us believe, but cannot say for certain, is a gay-related execution. I am grateful to OUTRAGE!, Doug Ireland, Mike Rogers, Stephen Barris, and others for insisting that we continue to ask questions. Our skepticism about what any government provides as a motivation for such violence is a healthy response; it's our action with regard to the information that requires a clear strategy. If it is true that they were put to death primarily because of a real or perceived "gay relationship" what is it that we should/can do to bring it to light, move our governments to respond, connect with our Iranian colleagues - both in the country/region and outside, and help move world and opinion international human rights experts to demand or Iran that it honor its commitments under international law to suspend use of the death penalty.

Finally, we need to bridge the gap that continues to exist between many lesbians and gay men about circumstances of sexual assault and rape. Because of the basic lack of respect for the lives, bodies and rights of girls and women in most of the world (including here in the US), the regular, persistent, sadistic level of abuse faced by girls and women around the world every day is heart wrenching. So just as I, as a lesbian, am skeptical of any claim that this case is not about homosexuality, I have to say that as a woman I am equally skeptical about claims that this is not simply a case of sexual assault on a 13-year old boy. Both stories are the types that get swept under the rug, ignored and justified too often.

So, how do we proceed? It's too late for justice for these young men. Can we focus on strategies for engaging world leaders on the general topic of imposing the death penalty in cases involved sexuality - whether consensual or not, since in either case, the punishment is certainly disproportionate to the crime?

Paula L. Ettelbrick, Executive Director

International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission

[  ilga.org