August 6, 2015
Please find below an Urgent Action update that Amnesty International has issued today on juvenile offender Salar Shadizadi whose execution has been postponed to 10 August. He remains at imminent risk of execution after a conviction for murder. He was 15 years old at the time of the crime.
The Urgent Action update will soon be available on the Amnesty International website at the following link:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/
More information:
Salar Shadizadi’s execution in Lakan Prison, Rasht, northern Iran, has been postponed for 10 days from the initial date of 1 August to 10 August. The change occurred late on 31 July. He remains in solitary confinement.
Salar Shadizadi was arrested in February 2007 and charged with the murder of a friend. He was not granted access to a lawyer at the investigative stage and was only allowed to retain a lawyer when his case was sent to court for trial. He says that he was also tortured and otherwise ill-treated during the investigative stage when he was held in the Investigation Unit (Agahi) in Rasht. He was first sentenced to death in December 2007 under the Islamic principle of qesas (retribution-in-kind) by Branch 11 of the Criminal Court of Appeal in Gilan province, which sat as a court of first-instance. Branch 37 of the Supreme Court upheld the sentence three months later.
In 2013, Salar Shadizadi submitted a request for judicial review based on a new article in Iran’s revised Penal Code, passed into law in May 2013. Branch 13 of Iran’s Supreme Court accepted the request for judicial review and sent the case back to the court of first instance to examine Salar Shadizadi’s maturity at the time of the crime. The court then referred Salar Shadizadi to Iran’s Legal Medicine Organization (LMO) for psychological examination. The LMO found that “there is no evidence to conclude that Salar Shadizadi was insane at the time of the crime but examining his mental growth seven years after the event is impossible.” Based on this finding, Branch 13 of the Supreme Court upheld the original death sentence.
