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| Zeinab Sokian |
Zeinab Sekaanvand Lokran comes from a poor, conservative Iranian-Kurdish family, and ran away from home at 15 to marry Hossein Sarmadi in the hope for a better life.
Soon after the wedding, Hossein started beating Zeinab - she asked for a divorce, but he refused. She told police, but they ignored her. She ran away, but her family disowned her.
She was 17 when her husband died. Zeinab was arrested and "confessed" that she killed her husband after he'd abused her for months and refused her requests for divorce.
She was then held at the police station for the next 20 days and repeatedly tortured by police officers.
Execution delayed during pregnancy
In 2015, Zeinab married a fellow prisoner in Oroumieh Central Prison and became pregnant.
Her execution was delayed while Zeinab was expecting. Last month she gave birth to a stillborn baby, and is now at risk of execution.
Doctors said her baby died in her womb 2 days earlier due to shock, around the same time her cell mate and friend was executed on 28 September. She was returned from hospital to the prison the very next day - denied any postnatal support or care since.
Raped by her brother-in-law
Zainab only met her state-appointed lawyer for the first time at her final trial session. It was then that she retracted confessions made when she'd had no access to a lawyer.
She told the court that her husband's brother, who she said had raped her several times, was responsible for the murder and had coerced her into confessing, promising he would pardon her (under Islamic law, murder victims' relatives have the power to pardon the offender and accept financial compensation instead).
This statement was ignored by the court, which instead relied heavily on her old "confessions" to reach its verdict.
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In Iran, girls are held criminally accountable by law from the age of nine (9),
and can be sentenced to death by hanging for crimes such as murder,
drug trafficking and armed robbery. Click here to read their stories. |
A child at the time of the crime
Zainab was just 17 at the time of the crime she is accused of. The courts completely failed to apply juvenile sentencing from Iran's Islamic penal code in her case.
They also failed to tell her that she could submit an application for retrial. Iran's penal code falls woefully short of what's required for juvenile offenders under international human rights law, and even the limited safeguards that do exist are not adhered to by the authorities.
The use of the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18 is also completely prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran has signed up to.
Thank you
More than 80,000 of you signed our petition urging the Iranian authorities to halt Zeinab's execution and throw out her death sentence. Her execution, which was scheduled to go ahead as early as 13 October 2016 is no longer imminent. Zeinab now has a new lawyer working on her case. Together they will submit an application for a retrial - which is Zeinab's right under Article 91 of Iran's Islamic Penal Code.
While this is extremely good news, her death sentence remains in place until a retrial is granted by the authorities.
Unfortunately, Zeinab's case is not an isolated case in Iran. We have recorded at least 74 executions of juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2016 in Iran. Scores of young people in Iran remain on death row for crimes committed when they were under 18.
Source: amnesty.org.uk, January 11, 2017
➤ Related content: Waiting to die: the Iranian child inmates facing execution – in pictures, The Guardian, January 8, 2016
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