• The young men Mehrdad Karimpour and Farid Mohammadi were executed by Iranian authorities on charges of "forced sodomy".
• Under the ayatollahs' regime, non-heterosexual minors are forced to undergo medical treatments such as the administration of psychotropic drugs, hormone therapy and electroshock sessions.
• The ultra-conservative president Ebrahim Raisi, elected in June 2021, has confirmed and tightened the law of terror.

The execution of Mehrdad Karimpour, 32, and Farid Mohammadi, 29, took place on 30 January, after six years spent on death row on charges of "forced sodomy". This was reported by the Human rights activist new agency (Hrana); no official confirmation has been received from Iranian authorities. Indeed, sentences are often carried out in secret. Iran is one of the countries in the world where same-sex relations can be punished with the death penalty. The others are Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Brunei and certain states of Nigeria.

From one hundred lashes to the death penalty

Starting from one hundred lashes in the case of relations between women, persecutions, torture and violence of various kinds are the punishments handed down under the ayatollahs' regime for any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage. For minors too.
A conviction is often reached through a trial lasting just a few minutes, in which a confession obtained under torture is admitted by the court as valid evidence.

Electroshock and hormone therapies for minors identified as LGBT

In 2018, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child denounced in a report that, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, minors identified as LGBT are forced to undergo medical treatments such as the administration of psychotropic drugs, hormone therapy and electroshock sessions, in order to "correct deviance".

The broader reality, however, is that such "reparative practices" are still applied in eighty countries around the world, Italy included. This alarm was raised a few days ago by the Società italiana di andrologia: according to its estimate, one in ten LGBT people is still a victim of these treatments.

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On the morning of January 30, two inmates accused of and convicted for “forced #sodomy” were executed in #Maragheh Central Prison.

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#IranNews #executions #secretexecutions #humanrights #FaridMohammadi #MehrdadKarimpour #LGBTQrights

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Gay men and lesbians are also forced to resort to gender surgery in order to survive

Iran recognises gender reassignment surgery — that is, it permits the procedures necessary for a change of sex and the consequent modification of one's name on official documents. It is considered the path to redemption granted by the regime.

Aram Bolandpaz, an Iranian journalist and activist who fled to Great Britain, reported in an interview that "40 per cent of gender reassignment surgeries in Iran are performed on people — men and women — who are gay, lesbian or bisexual. They do not resort to surgery because they want to, but solely because of the pressure they face from a society that brands them as deviants and uses the law to threaten them."

Under the Iranian penal code, the death penalty is applicable for crimes committed from the age of nine

In addition to prohibited sexual relations, the crimes for which Iranian law provides for capital punishment are murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, paedophilia, terrorism, political dissent, adultery, prostitution and around twenty other offences. The minimum age for the application of the death penalty is for crimes committed from the age of nine lunar years (8.7 years) for girls and fifteen lunar years (14.6 years) for boys.

The ultra-conservative president Ebrahim Raisi, elected in June 2021, has confirmed and tightened the law of terror as a means of controlling a population of which 80 per cent lives below the poverty line.

Approximately three hundred sentences were carried out in 2021; they often took place in secret, with no official communication either before or after. Knowing the exact figure is therefore impossible. What is certain, however, is that women, minors and members of ethnic minorities are also among those executed — the majority being Kurdish prisoners.

Some never reach trial because they are executed in the street

The reign of terror is so pervasive that simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to lose one's life at the hands of the security forces. As happened to Sajjad Ka'ibi, recently killed by police while he was celebrating his 22nd birthday with friends in a park near the municipality of Shus, in the south-west of the country. And to the 22-year-old of Kurdish origin, Mohammad Ahmadi Matin, who was shot twice in the street by an officer in front of his mother as they were returning from a funeral in the province of Kermanshah, in western Iran.

In the first case, the police killed on the grounds of having detected "dangerous behaviour"; in the second, because the young man had refused to pay a bribe.