DUBAI: Leading international human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Iran to end executions of citizens accused of drinking alcohol in the conservative Islamic country. “Iranian authorities should immediately suspend all use of the death penalty after reports that two death sentences for drinking alcohol issued by a lower court had been upheld,” HRW said in a statement published on Friday. “Iran should abolish the death sentence completely for crimes that are not considered serious and exceptional under treaties that bind it, and provide further public information regarding the case against these individuals,” it added. On June 25, 2012, the official Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) reported that the prosecutor general of Khorasan Razavi province, Hojjatoleslam Hasan Shariati, had confirmed that the Supreme Court had affirmed death sentences issued by a lower court against two people convicted of drinking alcohol. He was quoted as saying that the two “had consumed alcoholic drinks for the third time" and officials were “in the process of making the necessary arrangements for the implementation of the execution order." “Sentencing Iranians to death for consuming alcohol is a scary signal of how little Iran's judges value Iranian lives and how casually they can make a decision to end them," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Iran's courts apparently have nothing better to do than harass and even kill Iranians for engaging in dubious ‘crimes.'" According to Iran's penal code, consumption of alcohol is a “hadd” crime, or a crime against God, for which shari'a, or Islamic law, assigns fixed and specific punishments. The usual punishment for consumption of alcohol is 80 lashes, but article 179 of the code provides that individuals with two prior alcohol convictions will receive the death penalty upon their third conviction. The law, however, allows a court to ask the Supreme Leader or his representative, usually the head of the judiciary, for clemency if defendants repent after being convicted of the crime based on their own confession. Clemency is not an option, though, if the conviction was based on witness testimony. “It is not known whether the defendants in this case have repented, or whether their convictions were based on witness testimony or their own confessions,” added the New York-based rights organization.
