The regime in Iran hanged a 17 year-old youth on Tuesday for a crime he committed when he was 14.
Mohammad Hassanzadeh was the first youth executed by the regime since they hung a young girl in 2004.
Iranian Rooz News reported:
On Tuesday June 10, 2008, Mohammad Hassanzadeh (Mohammad Hassan-Zadeh), a 17-year old adolescent who had been sentenced to death was hanged in a Sanandaj prison in Southwest Iran.
According to a source in Sanandaj familiar with the case, Mohammad Hassanzadeh was sentenced to death when he was 15 years old. He was one of two adolescents on the death row in the Sanandaj prison who was hanged on Tuesday, as the other prisoner awaits the execution of his sentence. This source also mentioned that there were three other adolescents waiting for their death sentence whose cases are very similar to these two.
After a 16-year old girl named Atefe Sahaleh was executed in 2004 in the northern town of Neka, Mohammad (born in 1991) is the first person who was given the death sentence while he was still under 18 and whose execution too was while he had not passed that age group. There have been other under-18 year-old youth sentenced to death in Iran, but their death sentences were not executed until they had reached that age because of international pressure over Iran’s violations of human rights and the rights of children. International conventions and agreements, to which Iran is also a signatory, call for countries not to sentence anyone to the death penalty under the age of 18 years.
