Iranian authorities are exposing their “utterly brutal sense of justice” by continuing to carry out “cruel and inhuman” corporal punishments including floggings, amputations, and forced blinding, Amnesty International charged on Wednesday.
Hundreds of prisoners are flogged in Iran each year, sometimes in public, Amnesty noted. In the latest flogging case on January 5, a journalist was lashed 40 times in Esfahan Province after being convicted of inaccurately reporting the number of motorcycles confiscated by local authorities.
“The authorities’ prolific use of corporal punishment, including flogging, amputation and blinding, throughout 2016 highlights the inhumanity of a justice system that legalizes brutality,” said Randa Habib, Amnesty’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“These cruel and inhuman punishments are a shocking assault on human dignity and violate the absolute international prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment,” she added. “The latest flogging of a journalist raises alarms that the authorities intend to continue the spree of cruel punishments we have witnessed over the past year into 2017.”
Iran is a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment.
Other cases mentioned by Amnesty include an unmarried couple who were sentenced last April to 100 lashes each for engaging in “an illegitimate relationship,” and some 35 students who participated in a mixed-gender graduation party last May, each of whom was sentenced to 99 lashes.
The crimes for which Iranians may be subject to flogging include “publicly eating during Ramadan, having relationships outside of marriage and attending mixed-gender parties.” According to Amnesty, these activities “are protected under the rights to freedom of belief, religion, expression and association and must never be criminalized.”
Amnesty also cited flogging cases reported on the Facebook page of a feminist Iranian group, My Stealthy Freedom.
In one of the online reports, a 28-year-old woman who was sentenced to 80 lashes for attending a birthday party described the day of her punishment as “the worst day of [her] life.” After her arrested, she was photographed and fingerprinted, then brought to a room where a woman flogged her repeatedly while her hands and feet were bound. “With the impact of the first lash, I jumped out of my [seat] uncontrollably,” she recalled. “I was so shocked that even my tears would not drop. I wanted to scream, but I could not even control my voice. Every time she hit me hard, she would ask me to repent so that God would forgive me.”
Another woman who was arrested for attending a mixed-gender party to celebrate her engagement said that authorities raided the event shortly after it began and found bottles of alcohol. Guests at the party were beaten, taken to a police station, held in jail for three days, then sentenced to 74 lashes each.
“I don’t remember how many lashes I had received, but I reached a stage where I was just moaning and had become numb with pain,” the women said. “When I finally arrived home, I was afflicted with a terrible pain on my body while my soul was aching due to the feelings of humiliation and fear that I had lived throughout the entire ordeal.”
Amnesty also documented four cases of amputations imposed for stealing. In some cases, the punishment involved “cross-amputations” of fingers and toes on opposite sides of the body.
“Severing people’s limbs, taking away their eyesight and subjecting them to brutal lashings cannot be considered justice,” Habib said. “The Iranian authorities should urgently abolish all forms of corporal punishment and take urgent steps to bring the country’s deeply flawed criminal justice system into line with international human rights law and standards.”
Earlier this month, a number of Iranian political prisoners were reported to have started hunger strikes in order to bring greater attention to the country’s deteriorating human rights situation.
Executions in Iran have increased in each of the first three years of President Hassan Rouhani’s tenure, reaching a total of 966 in 2015, the highest total in a decade.
A surge of executions in August prompted the United Nations’ top investigator into Iran’s human rights record to blast the regime for its “complete disregard of its obligations under international human rights law and especially of international fair trial standards and due process guarantees.”
[Photo: Amnesty International ]