Rights group says 177 Iranian minors sentenced to death in past decade

Over the course of the past decade, Iran has sentenced to death 177 minors and executed 34 over them, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

The group, based in New York and Vienna, published a list of the accused on its Web site that it said was compiled by detained Iranian activist Emad Baghi.

According to the article, “many of the death sentences were based on confessions obtained from defendants under torture or interrogations in which they had no access to a lawyer.”

While Iranian judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi asserted last week that “there are no executions of individuals under the age of 18 in Iran,” he noted that the government does carry out “qisas,” or eye-for-eye retribution for murder, and said that minors have been executed under this law when a settlement with the family of the murder victim cannot be reached.

The Campaign said that Iran executes more minors than any other nation, adding that two-thirds of all such executions in the past three years have taken place in the Islamic Republic.

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