Court Hangs 2 Gay Teens

[Lee]

LONDON, July 21 ¨C Two gay teenagers were publicly executed in Iran on 19 July 2005 for the ¡®crime¡¯ of homosexuality. The youths were hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad, in north east Iran. They were sentenced to death by Court No. 19.

Iran enforces Islamic Sharia law, which dictates the death penalty for gay sex.

One youth was aged 18 and the other was a minor under the age of 18. They were only identified by their initials, M.A. and A.M.

They admitted ¨C probably under torture, London-based gay human rights group Outrage! suggests ¨C to having gay sex but claimed in their defence that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death.

Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes.

Their length of detention suggests that they committed the so-called offences more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16.

Ruhollah Rezazadeh, the lawyer of the youngest boy (under 18), had appealed that he was too young to be executed and that the court should take into account his young age (believed to be 16 or 17). 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 being hunted by the police, but they have gone into hiding and cannot be found. If caught, they will also face execution.

News of the two executions was reported by ISNA (Iranian Students News Agency) on 19 July.

A later news story by Iran In Focus, allegedly based on this original ISNA report, claimed the youths were executed for sexually assaulting a 13 year old boy. But the ISNA report does not mention any sexual assault.

A report of the executions on the website of the respected democratic opposition movement, The National Council of Resistance Of Iran, also makes no reference to a sexual assault.

The allegation of sexual assault may either be a trumped up charge to undermine public sympathy for the youths, a frequent tactic by the Islamist regime in Iran.

Or, Outrage! Suggests, it may be that the 13 year old was a willing participant but that Iranian law (like UK law) deems that no person of that age is capable of sexual consent and that therefore any sexual contact is automatically deemed in law to be a sex assault.

If the 13 year old was sexually assaulted, why was he not identified and also put on trial (under Iranian law both the victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes are punished)?

Full story in Farsi from ISNA, with three photographs can be seen at http://isna.ir/Main/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-556874

¡°This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran,¡± said Peter Tatchell of the London-based gay human rights group OutRage!

¡°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.

¡°Altogether, an estimated 100,000 Iranians have been put to death over the last 26 years of clerical rule. The victims include women who have sex outside of marriage and political opponents of the Islamist government.

¡°Last August, a 16 year old girl, Atefeh Rajabi, was hanged for ¡®acts incompatible with chasity.¡¯

¡°Britain¡¯s Labour government is pursuing friendly relations with this murderous regime, including aid and trade. We urge the international community to treat Iran as a pariah state, break off diplomatic relations, impose trade sanctions and give practical support to the democratic and left opposition inside Iran,¡± said Tatchell.

Outrage! Is calling for world-wide urgent action and asks that you protest to the Iranian Ambassador at the Embassy in your country. In addition, Outrage! asks that you also press your government to take urgent action against Iran.

¡ö Last week in Nigeria, Yusuf Kabir (40) and 18-year-old Usman Sani appeared before Judge Mustapha Sani Saulawa at Katsina¡¯s Sharia Court Number Three charged with committing sodomy. The hearing was adjourned until early August. If convicted, the pair could face death by stoning.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported from Nigeria that a 50 years-old man had been sentenced to death by stoning after admitting to a judge that he had had homosexual sex. This was immediately after the court had found him not guilty of having sex with a teenage boy.

http://www.ukgaynews.org.uk/Archive/2005july/2101.htm

Damn backward countries

Regards,

Lee

[BradleyFL]

What BASTARDS! That is so sick. People have real problems with sexuality. Its like they cant live with knowing other people have sex and it isnt always the way they have it. They cant handle the fact that they have borning normal sex when other people actually have fun and exciting sex.

[fallen]

Shit like this just makes my blood boil, and I'm not even gay.

[Jasun]

ANd yet we're bombing countries for cheaper oil.

God, I'm afriad, is most certainly dead.

[Squirt]

Two of my best friends growing up were Iranian.. they taught me Farcy... I went to their houses for dinner and they had the most close knitt.. loving families.

In africa, and some middle eastern cultures.. they cut the clitoris off little girls and sew their vaginas shut.. except for a small hole the size of a pinky finger. This is so they wont enjoy sex and so the husband knows they are a virgin when they marry. A lot of the girls get infections from the cutting, and/or after the cutting becuase when they start to menstruate it's hard to keep totally clean.

If you're not a straight man, then you're a second class citizen, or worse, in most of the world. :king:

[Paul Markham]

This to me sums it up.

Damn backward countries

so why do you expect them to act like Sweden or Canada?

They are just out of the middle ages, so why judge them by 21st Century WESTERN rules?

Iran recently had an election and the threw out the moderate and installed a fundamentilist President, seems to me the majority have spoken.

Just because pre marital sex, sodomy, homosexuality is legal and accepted here, by me as well, why do we continue to assume others should be the same when it totally goes against the core of their beliefs.

They are Muslim and a strict fundemental version of it, why do you think you should impose your Christian or even agnostic values on them?

Respect them for their beliefs even if they are opposed to yours.

[Jasun]

Respect them for their beliefs even if they are opposed to yours.

This is NOT the belief of the majority.

The election you're talking about was ridiculous... virtaully all of the candidates were disqualified for being "too liberal".

These people did not and could not choose that government.

[dannyz]

They are just out of the middle ages, so why judge them by 21st Century WESTERN rules?

Because we're not in the middle ages, and Iran is commiting serious human rights abuses. Should we have allowed Hitler to exterminate all the Jews rather then judging the Nazis for their beliefs?

I'm not trying to say the West is better, and I have the utmost respect for people of other cultures and religions, but we're talking about a dictatorship government that the people did not even choose.

It's really the governments of all countries, definitely including the western countries as well here, that we need to keep an eye on. It's never right for innocent people to be slaughtered by the people purporting to protect them.

[thetwink]

that is terrifying. I couldn't imagine living in a society like that.

[BradleyFL]

Respect them for their beliefs even if they are opposed to yours.

Respect who? Their leader or the people?

I guess we should respect Bush since how he isnt up on the 21st Century rules.

[Axel]

I guess Iranian people must be very frightened not to have enough kids for the country to grow, since they only want straight sex.

They are really sick. As if they were uncapable of thinking what is good or bad for people: in one hand you kill 10 women, you can be sentenced to 30 years of jail, and on the other hand you have sex with a friend in your private room and you can be sentenced to death !!!???

[basschick]

i don't respect anything that kills younsters - we used to believe in slavery here, and it is only because some people refused to respect it that it was overturned.

were women even allowed to vote in that election?

Respect them for their beliefs even if they are opposed to yours.

[Lee]

I just found an image of the two teens that were hung, nothing gruesome for those of you wonderig but still saddening non the less

Regards,

Lee

[LiveTwinksCam]

Horrible!

[BDBionic]

That is a pretty sad case. Definitely tragic, and outrageous.
For a number of reasons. I personally feel executing juveniles (or at least people who are juveniles when they commit a crime) is horribly wrong. And that it's difficult if not impossible to accept how what they did could result in execution...Really fucked up and sad.

Though... here in the United States it was only recently that the Supreme Court ruled against the execution of persons who were juveniles when they committed the crime for which they were convicted. And when I say "only recently", I mean this year. 2005. Up until that point from 1989, it was perfectly legal in the United States to execute someone who was 16 when they committed the crime. It was also only within the last 5 years that the US Supreme Court ruled against the execution of the mentally impaired and declared that as cruel and unusual punishment.

From the objective sense, 16 year olds in Iran are much more integrated in to adulthood than 16 year olds in the US. An Iranian 16yo most likely works and plays a role in supporting the family financially, 16 year olds can serve in the Iranian military, and so on.

In different countries and cultures, things are different. That up until this year many states in the US had the legal authority to execute juveniles made us pretty barbaric in the eyes of most of Western Europe. Yet we'd decided here in the US that if a crime was serious enough, despite having been committed by a juvenile, capital punishment was warranted. So I suppose that's just the same thing that's happened in Iran. They deem the offense serious enough to warrant such a punishment. Within the context of their culture, it's no less justified than how it was here in the US. No less legal. No more cruel.

That's the objective, Middle East Diplomacy and World Affairs major in me talking. Doesn't prevent that story from turning my stomach, though.