Iranian justice minister says executions in Iran too high

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iran’s justice minister said that the country should consider other forms of punishment to execution, in a county where Kurds were among the hundreds executed last year.

“We want to find the most effective kind of punishment so that we are able to consider replacing execution," said the minister, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, according to the Tasnim news agency.

He said the death penalty should be reserved for "corrupt people".

"Of course, execution as a form of punishment should remain, but not in the numbers that we have today,” he said.

"Execution cannot be rejected, because there are some corrupt people in the country and there is no way for them but the death penalty," he added.

Iran executed at least 977 people in 2015, compared to 743 the year before, according to Amnesty International.

Last August, 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 had said in a statement.

Iran executed as many as 20 Kurds on a single day in August, accused of murder and ties to foreign Islamist groups.

Rights groups claim that those executed had confessed under torture.

Iran is second only to China in the number of executions carried out annually.