UN rights experts urge Iran to halt execution of childhood offender News
UN rights experts urge Iran to halt execution of childhood offender

A group of UN human rights experts on Thursday urged Iran to halt the execution of a man who committed a crime when he was 15 years old.

Mohammad Kalhori, “was sentenced to death for killing his teacher when he was 15 years old.” Recently, it has been reported that his family was told to visit him for the last time, which has been “taken as a strong indication that his execution is imminent.”

UN human rights experts have urged Iran to both halt this execution and to annul the death sentence. The experts stressed that Iran has ratified both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. By making these ratifications, Iran “has committed itself to prohibiting the use of the death penalty” for anybody under eighteen who has committed a crime. The experts also noted that this case goes against an amendment that Iran made to its Penal Code. This amendment allowed “judges to provide alternative sentences for child offenders if there was uncertainty about their ‘mental development’ at the time of the crime or if they had not realised the nature of the crime.” A forensic report on Kalhori “found he was not mentally mature at the time of the crime.”

Previously, the UN experts have communicated these concerns to the government of Iran.