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This footage is alleged to show the public hanging of a man in the Iranian city of Karaj
on the 25th February. The footage was uploaded to YouTube by the
anti-government Facebook page and YouTube channel Freedom Messenger.
Freedom Messenger do not provide any personal details about the man, such as his name or
age, or any background to why he has been executed but say he was one of three prisoners
to face public hanging on that day in Alborz province.
This is a claim repeated by the anti-government coalition group the National Council of Resistance
of Iran, which calls itself an Iranian "parliament-in-exile". Although public hangings are not uncommon
in Iran, according to Amnesty International they are usually carried out using a crane
which lifts the condemned person up by a noose around their neck, rather than the gallows
seen here. According to a viewer who sent us the video,
as well as a blogger on the website Medium, during this part of the footage the man can
be heard begging for his mother, who is alleged to be in the crowd of spectators, to give
him a final hug. Although it's impossible to make out the man's
mother from the footage, a woman in the crowd can be heard yelling back.
The men carrying out the execution appear to refuse the prisoner's request however,
and proceed to beat him after he tries to struggle free.
The prisoner is then hoisted up onto a platform and the noose placed around his neck.
This platform is then removed and within seconds the man appears to be dead.
Just four days before this footage was alleged to have been filmed, the United Nations released
a statement saying it was "deeply concerned about the reported spike in executions in
Iran" since the start of 2014. According to the UN, in just over seven weeks
at least 80 people have been executed by the Iranian government, although this figure could
be as high as 95. The majority of these executions were punishment
for drug-related offences, crimes which don't meet the threshold in international law for
which the death penalty can be applied. We were actually pretty shocked to discover
there was a threshold at all for determining when the death penalty can be applied by a
state and when it can't so we'd be really interested in hearing your thoughts about
this in the comments below. But to get back to Iran, the UN was particularly
concerned about the reported secret executions of two men named Hadi Rashedi and Hashem Sha'bani
Amouri. Both men were members of Iran's minority Ahwaz Arab community, and were reportedly
sentenced to death on charges of "enmity against God", corruption on earth and acts against
national security. They are also believed to have been denied access to lawyers and
subjected to torture in order to force confessions. According to the UN, the number of executions
in Iran began to escalate in the second half of 2013, with 500 people being killed that
year in total. This was a massive increase from 2012 when
Amnesty International figures show that 129 people were killed in the country, again,
mostly for drug-related offences. And even then, this made Iran the second biggest executor
of any country worldwide. Only China, which is believed to have executed thousands of
its citizens that year, came higher. Although there have been other spikes in Iran's
execution levels in the past, this most recent escalation follows the election of President
Hassan Rouhani back in June 2013. Which seems pretty at odds with Rouhani's
campaign slogan of "moderation and wisdom", as well as the reformist image that he's been
cultivating on the world stage ever since. Since taking office on 4 August 2013, Rouhani
has pardoned dozens of political prisoners, got himself a Twitter account despite the
fact that Twitter is currently banned in Iran, broken more than three decades of silence
between his country and the United States, and, perhaps most significantly, begun rolling
back Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for relief from sanctions.
But as his hypocrisy over Twitter suggests, all this doesn't mean that Rouhani is now
a champion of human rights. And it's not just the issue of capital punishment
where Rouhani's reformist image could do with some work.
According to a Human Rights Watch report released in January, Iranian officials are continuing
to detain many civil society activists and leading opposition figures, including the
2009 presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both women and ethnic
and religious minorities continue to be discriminated against and the country remains one of the
largest prisons for journalists and bloggers in the world.
Not to mention that the government "systematically blocks websites, slows Internet speeds and
jams foreign satellite broadcasts. So is Rouhani just a massive hypocrite or
were the reforms he promised just too big for one man to take on?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and we'll see you again next time.