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Iran Human Rights (IHR) – Iranian media confirm that a 51-year old man has been executed for drinking alcohol, asserting that his “repentance” had been rejected.
Noting this as one of the rare occasions that authorities have admitted to carrying out an execution for alcohol consumption in the last 40 years, the director of Iran Human Rights (IHR), Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, said: “If this execution is not met with strong condemnation from the international community, the fear is that we will witness more executions on charges of alcohol consumption in the future.”
While confirming that a 51-year-old man identified only as M.M had been executed for drinking alcohol for the sixth time, Khorasan newspaper’s website stated that his “repentance” had not be accepted.
Drinking alcohol is considered as a hadd offense, that is, an offense for which the punishment is prescribed by the Islamic holy scripts. The punishment for drinking alcohol is 80 lashes according to the Islamic Penal Code.
According to Article 136 of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code, “where anyone commits the same offence punishable by hadd three times, and each time the hadd punishment is carried out upon him/her, the hadd punishment on the fourth occasion shall be the death penalty.”
However, Article 13(c) of the 2013 Code of Criminal Procedure, as well as Articles 114 to 119 of the Islamic Penal Code, grant judges the power to acquit the accused should they repent or seek amnesty from the Chief Justice.
The Khorasan article implicitly states that the reason for rejecting his “repentance” was the defendant’s claim to having “not consumed alcohol.” The article further states that “though the death row inmate had numerous other charges on his criminal record, including narcotics, the record did not play a major role in issuing the death sentence, which was a sharia punishment.”
On July 9th, IHR published news of the execution of a man who had been sentenced to death for drinking alcohol for the sixth time, in Mashhad Central Prison. The prisoner was executed on 8th July in the presence of his lawyer, Hossein Habibi-Shahri.
