PARIS: Rights campaigners have appealed to Iran to spare a Kurdish law student due to be executed on Sunday.
Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on the authorities there not to go ahead with the execution of Habibolah Latifi, who has been sentenced to death for taking part in armed acts.
Iranian Kurdish activist Latifi was originally sentenced to death in 2008 for taking part in armed acts in the western province of Kordestan, according to his lawyer Saleh Nikbakht — a ruling upheld on appeal in February 2009.
He was detained in November 2007 and charged with taking part in an assault on the car of the prosecutor in Sanandaj, the capital of Kordestan, and attacking a police station the same year.
He was found "guilty of waging war against God (moharebeh) for cooperating with PJAK," the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, a banned Iranian-Kurdish rebel group.
According to the lawyer, Latifi had admitted being a PJAK supporter but denied committing acts of violence. The student told the court he was not in Sanandaj when the attacks took place.
London-based Amnesty on Saturday appealed to Iran to commute the sentence, after hearing from his lawyer that he was to be executed on December 26 at Sanandaj prison in Kordestan.
"While we recognize that governments have a responsibility to bring to justice those who commit crimes, this must be done according to international standards for fair trial," said Amnesty’s Malcolm Smart.
"It is clear that Habibolah Latifi did not receive a fair trial by international standards, which makes the news of his impending execution all the more abhorrent," said Smart, their Middle East and North Africa director.
New York-based Human Rights issued a similar statement Friday, calling on Iran’s judges to rescind the execution order and suggesting that Latifi had not had a fair trial.
"The circumstances surrounding Latifi’s arrest, detention, and conviction strongly suggest that the Iranian authorities have violated his fundamental rights," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
"As in numerous previous security cases, intelligence agents appear to have subjected Latifi to torture and a court sentenced him to death without any convincing evidence against him."
In Paris, a group of between 20 and 30 demonstrators picketed the Iranian embassy in the early hours of Sunday, with some protesters chaining themselves to the railings outside, organizers and police said.
Officers eventually moved in to cut the chains of the protesters and break up what they said was an unauthorized demonstration, said a police spokesman.
Hundreds of militants from the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a bloody campaign for self-rule in southeast Turkey, and its sister group in Iran, PJAK, are based in the mountains of northern Iraq.
