Mixed reports on Iran hangings
Rights groups dispute claims teens were hanged for being gay
By ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG
Washington Blade Friday, July 29, 2005
http://www.washblade.com/2005/7-29/news/worldnews/iran.cfm
A photo of two teenaged males being hanged in Iran last week swept
across the Internet with claims they were executed for being gay.
The Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay rights group,
released a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeating the
allegations and urging her to intervene. The U.K.-based gay rights
group Outrage, as well as Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht,
condemned the hangings.
But the circumstances that triggered the executions are now being
questioned by several human rights groups, which claim the teenagers,
Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, may not have been killed for being
gay.
Research conducted by the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights
Commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has found, so
far, that the teenagers were convicted of and executed for sexually
assaulting a 13-year-old male, a crime that occurred when the two teens
may have been minors.
Asgari's lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, told the Associated Press that
Iranian courts are supposed to commute death sentences handed to
children to five years in jail.
"The judiciary has trampled its own laws," Razaz Zadeh told AP.
But the lawyer said Iran's Supreme Court upheld the verdict and
allowed the execution despite his objections.
It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay
originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an
opposition group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the
U.S. State Department. Accounts of the executions on gay news Web sites
referenced reports by the group and its English language news site,
www.iranfocus.com.
IGHRC, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have not yet uncovered evidence
that the charges were trumped up, officials with those groups said.
Asgari and Marhoni also reportedly received 228 lashings while in
detention for drinking and theft.
The human rights groups note that Iran's execution and torture of the
teenagers remains appalling, no matter the circumstances.
'Not a gay case'
"It was not a gay case," said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director
of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, taking
issue with the Human Rights Campaign's statement that was quick to
condemn the execution as anti-gay.
"We would welcome HRC's involvement in demanding that our
government speak out on human rights violations. It was just the wrong
case," she said...
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