According to today's edition of Iran Newspaper, Iran's judiciary submitted a bill to the Parliament of Iran to pass a law to ban execution and life imprisonment of children alleged to have committed crimes under the age of 18.
According to Iran Newspaper ( روزنامه ايران ) Alireza Jamshidi, the spokesperson for the Iranian Judiciary, stated in a press conference with Iranian and International reporters that: "The judiciary must be considerate of children because unlike adults, children who have committed a crime, lack organized and established violence. Therefore we must have lenience to remove hard punishments from this age group."
He added: "In this bill we have predicated special rulings for children and youth who have committed crime to implement rehabilitation instead of imprisonment, and to consider the circumstances and well as the age of the child. In this bill boys and girls are treated the same and age has been the only consideration. In this bill the punishment of execution and life imprisonment has completely been eliminated."
Mr. Jamshidi stated that the bill suggest that: " Children's cases will be reviewed in special children divisions by female advisors and judges trained about children. In the bill, serious attention is given to cases of mistreatment of children, children labor and children prostitution."
"Creating family resolution centers, centers for children defense within the judiciary districts and special training of judges are some of the important tasks that judiciary is implementing"
Nazanin Afshin-Jam and Stop Child Execution campaign consider this a major step in Stopping the Execution and life imprisonment of children in Iran. We also warn that this is still just a bill and we encourage everyone to now work even harder to raise our voice until its official approval and proper implementation. It is important to note that based on consitition of Islamic government of Iran's constitution all the bills even after approval by parliament must be approved by the council of experts to verify its conformity with Islamic Sharia and often the bills after substantial delays get rejected at that stage.
We will continue to ask the international organizations and political leaders to contact Iranian government to comply with Iranian governments obligation with respect to the UN covenants regarding child executions and life imprisonments.
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