According to experts, Iran’s regime frequently uses the charge of sodomy to impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians.
Iran executed ten people on Wednesday, including a gay man, in Karaj, the capital of the Alborz Province, just outside of Tehran.
News organization Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported on Thursday about the latest wave of executions in the Islamic Republic.
According to HRANA, the identities of two of the executed people, Iman Safari Rad and Mehdi Khalgoldi, have been verified by HRANA. Iman Safavi Rad had previously been sentenced to death on charges of “sodomy by rape” and Mehdi Khalgoldi on charges of “rape.”
According to experts, Iran’s regime frequently uses the charge of sodomy to impose the death penalty on gays and lesbians.
Speaking from Germany, Dr. Kazem Moussavi, an Iranian dissident who writes about the clerical regime’s human rights violations, told The Jerusalem Post that the mullah regime labels same-sex relations as sodomy and he believes Iman Safavi Rad was gay.
Moussavi tweeted on Thursday about the executions in Karaj and elsewhere in Iran and urged that the “German federal government must absolutely resist the execution machinery of the mullahs.”
He noted that the executions this week took place directly after the trip of the top EU foreign relations official Josep Borrell to Iran to discuss Tehran’s re-entry into the nuclear accord. Human rights issues are not part of the atomic negotiations.
According to a 2008 British WikiLeaks diplomatic cable, Iran’s regime has executed between 4,000-6,000 gays and lesbians since the nation’s Islamic revolution in 1979.
Previous execution in January
The Post reported in January that the Islamic Republic continued its lethal homophobic policy, executing two men based on its anti-gay Sharia law system.
The two Iranian men, Mehrdad Karimpou and Farid Mohammadi were killed in the Maragheh prison in northwestern Iran, according to the organization Human Rights Network in Iran. The men were arrested six years ago.
Peter Tatchell, an LGBTQ+ and human-rights campaigner, told the Post in January that “Iran is one of a dozen Muslim-majority countries and regions that enforce Sharia law and impose the death penalty for homosexuality.” The execution of these men follows a long-standing regime policy of the state-sanctioned murder of gay men, often on disputed charges after unfair trials that have been condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
“The international community must impose Magnitsky sanctions on the regime officials, judges and prison staff who authorized these executions – and on those responsible for the many other human rights cases of abuse in Iran, including the hanging of peaceful Kurdish, Baluch and Ahwazi Arab activists on fake terrorism charges,”
Peter Tatchell