The European Union has strongly condemned the execution of a 25-year-old man in Iran on Wednesday convicted of murder that he committed when he was a juvenile.
A statement issued by the office of EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, “The European Union condemns this execution in the strongest terms.”
Arman Abdolali was sentenced to death for the killing of his girlfriend Ghazale Shaker in 2014, but his execution had been postponed on several occasions.
The EU has in the past condemned the execution of other juvenile offenders in Iran and also the hanging of Rouhollah Zam, a dissident journalist who was abducted by Iranian intelligence in 2019 and hanged last year.
The statements went on to say that the EU “recalls yet again that death sentences for crimes committed by persons below the age of 18 are contrary to international obligations under the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Human rights organizations and United Nations experts have repeatedly called on Iran to end executions, specially those of juvenile offenders. For many years Iran has had the second highest rate of carrying out the death penalty in the world, after China.