Protests continue against Iranian executions

Washington Blade:

Rights group claims two more gays to be hanged By ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG

Friday, August 19, 2005

International protests against the executions of two teenagers in Iran last month have continued, with demonstrators broadening their demands to include a worldwide ban on executing juveniles.

Meanwhile, a human rights group said it is investigating claims that two Iranian men will be executed for homosexuality at the end of this month.

Photos of two Iranian teenagers awaiting execution, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahomoud Asgari, surfaced on the Internet in mid-July. Gay rights groups Outrage and the Human Rights Campaign quickly condemned the executions and claimed the boys were killed for being gay. HRC urged the State Department to investigate.

But Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission were not able to find evidence corroborating the claims the boys were killed for being gay. Instead, their research had uncovered, to that point, that the boys were executed for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy at knifepoint.

Scott Long, director of Human Rights Watch’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender program, said the group based its findings on accounts from journalists and human rights workers in Iran, as well as local news reports.

Gay rights groups and human rights organizations continue to sift through conflicting accounts of the executions, trying to distinguish between rumors and facts.

It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated, in part, with incorrect English translations of an Iranian Student News Agency report. The translations mistakenly claimed the article did not mention sexual assault, which it did, according to Hadi Ghaemi, Human Rights Watch’s Iran researcher and a native Persian speaker.

Outrage, a British gay rights group that first brought attention to the case, maintains it is likely the boys were executed for being gay.

“[The Iranian government] has previously lied to justify public executions,” said Outrage’s Ramzi Isalam in a statement. “[The death penalty] is barbaric and should be abolished.”

Digging for facts

Afdhere Jama, the editor of Huriyah, a U.S.-based magazine for gay Muslims, claims he has information from sources inside Iran who say the boys were lovers and that was the reason for the execution. He said the Blade could not speak with his sources and he would not identify them because it would endanger their lives.

Long said that Human Rights Watch is looking into Jama’s claims and hopes to speak directly with his sources.

“We’re waiting to get information we can actually check out,” Long said.

Human Rights Watch is also investigating rumors that two Iranian men in Arak will be executed for homosexuality at the end of August, Long said.

So far HRW has found that the two men were convicted of the abduction and rape of a 22-year-old man.

There is, as in the previous case, a possibility that the charges were trumped up and HRW is continuing to investigate, Long said.

It is difficult to obtain information because people inside Iran are very afraid to speak out, according to Long. HRW is sending a report on the Arak executions scheduled for late August to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.

Doug Ireland, a journalist and blogger who has been following both cases closely, said he believes the rape charges against Marhoni and Asgari, the two Iranian teens, were fabricated.

“The Iranian scholars I have spoken to have been skeptical to a huge degree of the rape charge,” Ireland said in a telephone interview with the Blade. “There is a history of inventing charges to fit the regime’s agenda.”

In addition to conversations with Iranian scholars and exiles, Ireland said he has corresponded with the editor of an underground gay Iranian magazine, who asked Ireland not to disclose his identity or the name of his publication to protect his safety.

“In the wake of the story about the hanging of the two teens going global, the atmosphere of anti-gay repression and surveillance has considerably heightened in Iran,” Ireland said.

“We can see evidence of this heightened repression in the announcement of new executions of gay people, which are programmed for the end of August.”

Worldwide protests

As investigations continue, demonstrations were staged last week in London, San Francisco and Paris to protest the executions of the teens and, more broadly, Iran’s criminalizing of homosexuality. In Iran, homosexual intercourse between two men is punishable by death and homosexual acts that do not involve intercourse are punishable by 100 lashes, according to Ghaemi.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement that he was “outraged and appalled” that Iran executed two teens for their “alleged sexual orientation.” In light of the executions, the Netherlands and Sweden have stopped sending gay asylum seekers back to Iran.

State Department spokesperson Noel Clay told the Blade that the U.S. government was not planning to issue a statement condemning the hangings because the circumstances are unknown. When asked if the department would condemn the executions because one of the boys was a minor when the alleged crime was committed, Clay declined to answer.

Some protesting the executions have said the United States and other Western countries are guilty of a double standard while criticizing Iran for its policies on capital punishment.

“We simply cannot be asking the world to point a flashlight on the recent executions in Iran, for example, and not be willing to put our own Western countries under the same scrutiny,” wrote Kim Vance in a column for Xtra!, a Canadian gay magazine. Vance is co-director of the Canadian gay rights group, ARC International.

“It should also be pointed out that the U.S. continually has violated international norms of humane treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Guantanamo Bay and that the Bush administration has been hostile to full equality for gay and lesbian people,” Ireland said.

Some gay rights activists have also criticized HRC, which has not adopted a formal position on the death penalty.

“Would we in the queer community have responded with the same outrage if the headline had read, ‘Two Teenagers Executed in Iran’?” Vance wrote.

HRC spokesperson Jay Smith Brown said the group “[doesn’t] believe [capital punishment] to be specific to GLBT issues.”

Some gay rights activists have taken issue with HRC’s view.

“The narrow, single-issue focus of the institutional gay community in the U.S. rarely permits placing the gay issue in the larger human rights context,” Ireland said.