Hassan Afshar

Hassan Afshar (1996/1997 – 18 July 2016) was a 19-year-old Iranian man executed on 18 July 2016 at the Arak Prison in Arak, Markazi province, Iran, for allegedly raping a teenage boy in December 2014 when he was 17 years old.

The case sparked debate and condemnation for Iran's execution of juveniles and the persecution of homosexuals, after Afshar denied raping the boy and said that the intercourse had been consensual.

Background

Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic government took a proactive role in persecuting LGBTQ people, especially gay men. While the government denied the existence of homosexuals in Iran, as president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said before an auditorium of students at Columbia University in New York in 2007, there have been multiple instances of prosecution of men accused of "sodomy" under the country's Sharia.

In July 2005, two teenagers –Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni– were publicly hanged in Mashhad following a conviction of rape of a 13-year-old boy. However, LGBTQ rights activist Peter Tatchell denounced on OutRage! that Asgari and Marhoni had been, in fact, executed for consensual homosexual relations between them. In 2007, Makwan Moloudzadeh, another young man, was executed after being convicted on three counts of rape, with Tatchell accusing the Iranian government of killing gay men. However, some other LGBTQ+ rights activists, like Scott Long, have questioned Tatchell's approach to the issue of homophobia in Iran. Mehri Jafari, a lawyer who has taken up cases of homosexual men in Iran, has said that the new code increased the probability of crossed confessions, with a passive partner saying that he was raped, the active one would be executed, while those accused of rape usually claim that the act was consensual, which would make the accuser eligible for execution. IranWire reported in August 2016 that due to Afshar being 17 at the time of the offense, the Iranian judiciary waited for him to turn 19 to put him to death. The complaint was issued by the teenage boy's parents, with the alleged victim not testifying.

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the spokesperon for Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based NGO, condemned the executions and said that "many if not all" of the prisoners had been subjected to unfair trials and torture.

Afshar's execution was not well received by many Iranians, forcing the judiciary to postpone the scheduled hanging of another juvenile offender due to public outcry amid an increasing campaign against the overuse of the death penalty in the country.