Iran holds the grim record of executions of juveniles.

 Peyman Barandah is at imminent risk of execution on 10 May in Shiraz’s Adel Abad prison, Fars Province, Iran.

Peyman Barandah

He was 15 years old at the time of his arrest and was sentenced to death after a grossly unfair trial. On 2 May, the Prosecutor of Shiraz met with Peyman Barandah’s family and told them that if the cheque of 5.5 billion rials (US$169,500) representing blood money (diyah) they gave to the family of the teenager he was convicted of murdering does not clear at the bank on its due date of 7 May, then Peyman Barandeh’s execution will be carried out on 10 May as planned.This is just one of the urgent cases of juvenile executions awaiting. First of all, he was a child when the crime occurred, he has not been tried in a juvenile court but in adult court.

Secondly, his life would have been saved if his family had been able to pay Diyah, blood money. this shows that the death penalty in Iran is not out of a desire for justice but out of a desire for revenge. That makes the executioner no better than a killer. 

According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, every member state must consider every person under the age of 18 a child. In Iran, the law doesn’t make any distinction between the minimum age of criminal responsibility and the age at which minors are considered legally responsible at the same level as adults. So Iranian law considers both 15-year-old boys and 9-year-old girls to be criminally responsible.In other words, a 15-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl can be tried as adults and therefore receive the death penalty.The very reason that a 9-year-old girl is considered adult is because at the age of 9 a girl can be forced into marriage.

Iran's Unlawful and Arbitrary Executions of Juvenile Offenders

There are 160 juveniles on death row that was sentenced to be executed when they were children. This are the cases we are aware of, how many that are hidden we do not know, but what we do know is that Iran continues to execute children even if they have signed the human rights bill, One of the people in question is Mehdi Bohlouli who was 17 when he was sentenced to death for stabbing a man to death in a fight. He was due to be executed several weeks ago – around 15 years after his conviction – but it was halted just a few hours before. It is uncertain whether it has been postponed until a later date or not.

In the case of Peyman Barandah this means that the Iranian court considers him as an adult when he was convicted of this alleged crime, he has however claimed his innocence from day one, trying to tell the prosecutor that another teenager was responsible for the fatal blow. In any case, execution’s should not depend on the parent's ability to pay blood money. This is unjust and your life depends on whether you are rich or poor and since most people in Iran lives under the poverty line, just mullahs families are rich, it is most likely they can not pay blood money. 

Help us save Peyman Barandah’s life by putting pressure on the Iranian government, we must demand them to follow the human rights bill they signed. We must demand all juveniles on death row get their death sentence revoked or dismissed.