LONDON: Experts from the UN Human Rights Council have condemned Iran’s sudden execution of a young wrestler over the weekend.
“It is deeply disturbing that the authorities appear to have used the death penalty against an athlete as a warning to its population in a climate of increasing social unrest,” UN Special Procedures experts said in a statement issued to Arab News.
Navid Afkari, 28, was executed suddenly over the weekend after being accused of killing a security guard during anti-government protests in 2018. He strongly and repeatedly denied this charge.
“The execution of Afkari, the second execution in connection to protests in the last two months, together with the alarming frequency of death penalty sentences handed to protesters, raises concerns about the authorities’ future response to protests and to any expression of opposition or dissenting opinion,” the UN experts said in the statement.
They highlighted Afkari’s inability to access due legal process throughout his time in detention as a particularly egregious element of his case.
“If Afkari was guilty of murder, why was the trial conducted behind closed doors and through the use of forced confessions extracted under torture?” they asked.
“The execution of Navid Afkari was summary and arbitrary, imposed following a process that did not meet even the most basic substantive or procedural fair trial standards, behind a smokescreen of a murder charge.”
Afkari, the statement said, was tortured, beaten and suffocated during his detention. The experts said they were “appalled at these serious allegations of torture.”
Since the 2018 anti-government protests that Afkari participated in, Iran has regularly been convulsed by civil unrest.
Anti-government sentiment boiled over in November 2019 and January 2020 when protests against the entirety of Iran’s leadership swept across the country, before being violently suppressed by security forces.
Afkari’s execution, and his inability to access due legal process throughout his detention, have been widely condemned as cruel and unjust by rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
