| Mahmoud Asgari And Ayaz Marhoni |
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Mahmoud Asgari and '''Ayaz Marhoni''' were Iranian Arab teenagers from the province of Khuzestan who were Hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad , northeast Iran , on July 19 2005 . The case attracted international attention due to the age of the boys, and the claim that they were put to death for consensual gay sex. The Execution s were first reported in English by the British campaigning group OutRage! , who claimed that the Iranian Students' News Agency , in an online article on the day of the executions, indicated that the two were executed because they had been caught having sex with each other. This claim has been challenged by Hadi Ghaemi, Human Rights Watch 's Iran researcher and a native Persian speaker, who said that the ISNA article was titled "Lavat beh Onf." He translated the title as "homosexual act by coercion". {Link without Title} BACKGROUND Most interpretations of in Tehran upheld the Death Sentence . The ages of the boys remains unclear, with some sources claiming they were fourteen and sixteen at the time of their arrests and sixteen and eighteen when executed, and others claiming that the older boy, Marhoni, was already nineteen, and therefore not a Minor , when the alleged crime(s) took place. On July 20 2005 the National Council Of Resistance released a press release about the executions, stating that: "The victims were charged with disrupting public order among other things" {Link without Title} . No other charges were indicated. INTERNATIONAL CONCERN On July 22 2005 , Amnesty International issued a news release saying: According to reports, they were convicted of sexual assault on a 13-year-old boy and had been detained 14 months ago. Prior to their execution, the two were also given 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft" {Link without Title} .The claim that they raped a 13 year old boy while drunk and holding a knife to his throat, and then stole his bicycle, is supported by the alleged victim's father. In Tehran, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi decried the imposition of the death penalty on minors and discounted the government's allegation that the two had raped younger boys in the northeastern part of the country. {Link without Title} pointed to the executions of over four thousand Iranian Lesbian s and gay men since 1979, and stated the executions were "... just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran." {Link without Title} . Both Sweden and The Netherlands have responded to the executions by announcing that they will immediately halt extraditions of gays to Iran. The Dutch government also announced that its Ministry of Foreign Affairs will investigate the treatment of gays and lesbians in the Islamic state, and will immediately halt all extraditions of gay Iranian asylum-seekers. Civil rights groups in the US, United Kingdom and Russia have also called for the creation of similar policies {Link without Title} . Not all groups, however, agree that the case was one of anti-gay persecution: Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission has stated, "It was not a gay case." {Link without Title} . U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos , on the other hand, characterized the executions as violations of Iran's obligations under international law and a sign of bias against gays: "This sickening episode shines a bright light on the severe shortcomings of the Iranian legal system. No matter what legal sources or traditions a country bases its law upon, there is no justification for whipping and executing people amid an angry mob — particularly not when the convicts committed offenses while they were minors, who are specifically protected under international law. And in this case, authorities apparently chose to play on deep-seated feelings of bigotry toward homosexuality." {Link without Title} AFTERMATH It has been appeared that, the case was not a gay case, as Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission has stated before. In March 2006 Dutch Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk said that it was now clear "that there is no question of executions or death sentences based solely on the fact that a defendant is gay", adding that homosexuality was never the primary charge against people. {Link without Title} According to the immigration minister the Iranian government had made it clear that the teenagers were not hanged because they were homosexual but because they were found guilty of the abduction and rape of a minor. {Link without Title} SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS REFERENCES
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