TEHRAN: The Judicial Commission of Iran’s parliament has tabled a motion that, if passed, overturns death penalty for nearly 5,000 drug smugglers, a member of the body said.
The parliament had already approved generalities of the act with the difference being that it now will act retrospectively.
“In this regard, the Judicial Commission has given its approval to retrospectively support the overturning of death penalty for drug smugglers already sentenced to death,” lawmaker Jalil Rahimi was quoted as saying.
Reportedly, more than 100 lawmakers helped draw up the preliminary legislation as a measure against growing execution reports in the country.
Iran is a neighbor to Afghanistan, a leading producer and supplier of the world’s drugs, and faces big challenges at home with a young population susceptible to a variety of cheap and abundant addictive drugs.
The country is also located on the Balkan route which traverses Iran (often through Pakistan), Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria across South-East Europe to the Western European market.
The Balkan and northern routes are the main heroin trafficking corridors linking Afghanistan to the huge markets of the Russian Federation and Western Europe.
According to Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Yury Fedotov, Iran is directly or indirectly involved in almost 40 percent of all drug confiscations around the world.
Critics, however, say Iran’s use of death penalty in this regard has done little, if anything, to address the issue.
Responding to the report, Iranian Foreign Ministry Bahram Qassemi called on the European side to be “more realistic and forward-looking”. Ever since, the two sides have met twice on the issue of human rights in a bid to reach a common ground.
During the recent 34th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Asma Jahangir, the UN special reporter for human rights in Iran, presented her 40-page report on details of human rights violations in Iran.
In the report, Jahangir expressed concerns about no improvements in the human rights situation in Iran, voicing concerns over juvenile executions, accusations described by Iran as “unfair and politically motivated.”
