ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the execution of Kurdish prisoners in Iran as a “grave injustice.”
“The application of overly broad and vague criminal charges, coupled with a disdain for the rights of the accused to due process and a fair trial have in these cases led to a grave injustice,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement released Friday.
Iran executed as many as 20 Kurds on Tuesday accused of murder and ties to foreign Islamist groups.
"These people had committed murder,” Iran’s top prosecutor Mohammad Javad Montazeri, told state-rune IRIB TV. “[They] killed women and children, caused destruction and acted against the security, and killed Sunni religious leaders in some Kurdish regions."
Rights groups claim that those executed confessed under torture.
Shahram Ahmadi, about 40 years old, who was arrested in Iranian western city of Sanandaj was hanged in Rajaee Shahr prison on Wednesday. He “had allegedly been beaten and coerced into signing a blank piece of paper on which his false confession was recorded,” the UN’s statement reads.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran [KDP-I] also condemned the execution and called on human rights organization to “put pressure on Iran in order to prevent further executions.”
Iran is second only to China in the number of executions carried out annually. According to Amnesty International some 977 people were put to death by the Islamic Republic in 2015.
