Juvenile offender ‘Shayan Saeedpour’ who had been sentenced to death at the age of 17 was hanged early Tuesday morning in Saqqez, informed sources told the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN).

The execution was carried out despite the attempts of Shayan Saeedpour’s family along with a group of civilians and activists of Saqqez as well as the attempts of Human and International Human Rights Organizations to obtain the leniency of the victim’s family and the United Nations’ direct request to Iranian authorities not to enforce the execution. 

According to the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), by which Iranian authorities are also bound as Iran ratified this convention, the execution of offenders who were under the age of 18 at the time of committing the crime is prohibited. However, Iran has had the highest number of child-offenders executions in the world during the recent years.

Shayan Saeedpour had been sentenced to death for killing ‘Suleiman Azadi’ during a street fight when he was 17 in 2015. Shayan was previously under the care of a psychiatrist. He managed to escape the prison during a protest against prison conditions amid the coronavirus outbreak but he was rearrested by security forces.“Alireza Rezapou, the Saqqez prosecutor, is insisting on the enforcement of the execution sentence, and he has even called the victim’s family not to show leniency. The issue of Shayan and others escaping from Saqqez prison has also made them more persistent in the enforcement of the death sentence for my son and a number of prisoners in Saqqez, Baneh and Sanandaj before the month of Ramadan.”, Salah Saeedpour, Shayan’s father, told KHRN yesterday.
The insistence of Saqqez prosecutor on the enforcement of the death sentence for Shayan Saeedpour is contrary to the claims of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s officials in both national and international propaganda programs about recommending the victim’s families to show leniency towards offenders sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, further news has been published about the possibility of executing more prisoners at Sanandaj and Rajai Shahr prisons in the coming days.