Mohammad Mostafaei is a well known Iranian human rights lawyer and an opponent of capital punishment. Before he was forced to leave Iran in 2010, he regularly represented juvenile defendants in death penalty cases. He currently lives in Norway.
Early in his career, Mostafaei, now 40, together with a group of lawyers in Shiraz, vowed to defend impoverished women who faced the death penalty. He defended 13 women who faced death by stoning and succeeded in acquitting 10 of them.
Following an increase in the number of activists for women’s rights and relative improvements in the defense of women facing the death penalty, he turned his attention to defending children and teenagers. Most accused children are kept in prison until they turn 18, at which point they are executed. But Mostafaei says that during his work, he came across cases where the condemned criminal was under 18 years of age at the time of execution. “In my view,” he says, “the judiciary is breaking the law. Behavioral scientists have concluded that people under 18 are not mentally mature enough” to be tried as adults. In the 41 cases in which Mostafaei was the defense lawyer, 19 defendants were rescued from certain death.
In Norway, he founded the Universal Tolerance Organization. He has been active in defending lawyers in Iran but he admits he misses defending children behind bars and who face the death penalty.
Note: Under Islamic law, when a killing is deemed to be “private”, the punishment, or “retribution”, can be decided by the next of kin. Relatives can condemn the killer to death, forgive him or demand blood money.
Recently we have not heard much about people mobilizing in order to defend under-age offenders facing the death penalty in Iran. Why?
There are people in Iran who are passionately trying to defend children and those under 18, but they are few and far between. But, more importantly, some of them are not even lawyers.
Unfortunately, without giving undue praise to myself, this lack of attention to children started when I left Iran. Some of my lawyer colleagues were caring enough to take up cases that I had left behind, but the media now rarely pays attention to the plight of children who face capital punishment.
When, in 2009, Behnoud Shojaee and Delara Darabi – both juveniles when they were arrested – were executed, why did judicial authorities resist public opinion against the executions? Were they trying to show their power, or were they acting against the civil rights activists?
I cannot say with certainty. In any case, when the judgment to execute is sent to the responsible magistrate, he has to carry it out. Unfortunately, our judges are not mature enough to care about human life; they turn their backs on arguments against killing people.
Something positive, however, came from those bitter episodes. Now, if the accused is under 18, there are limitations on issuing death penalty verdicts for drug-related offenses and retributions. Defenders of human rights have now a better chance to defend children against death penalty.
Why do trial lawyers not pay more attention to such cases?
Unfortunately, most trial lawyers are focused on their own income. Few lawyers want to defend human rights cases. Some say that defense lawyers in such cases are more likely to be harassed or even arrested. I must say that this is not the case. For years in Iran, I defended cases of children facing the death penalty and women who would be stoned to death if convicted, and had no problems. It was only after I started defending political cases that the troubles started.
Even the few times that I was arrested, the interrogations were not about my underage clients. The interrogators criticized me for talking to Persian-language media outside the country about political cases. When I persuaded them that my only goal was to save lives and had no political motives, they left me alone.
I recommend that Iranian lawyers not be afraid of such cases and forcefully defend them. I believe that a lawyer who does not do pro bono work on human rights cases is a businessman, not a lawyer.
I have heard that you chose this path because of your own painful experiences, and those of your mother. Is this true?
Like many of my generation, I had a very difficult childhood. My mother was a hardworking woman and, like many women of her generation, suffered from violence at home and in society.
I witnessed an execution when I was 15 and it struck me that the person who was killed looked very young. I did not believe Behnoud’s execution would happen. But unfortunately, I saw it with my own eyes. It had a devastating effect on me. Not a day passes by that I don’t remember him.
The Guardian and Sherbet created an animation about Mostafaei’s experiences as a child and his decision to pursue legal work. You can view it here.
You accuse the judiciary of transgression, but their judgments are based on religious laws. How do you explain your assertion that they are wrong?
Official courts and authorities in Iran do not recognize legal contracts entered into by people under 18, stating that a minimum age of 18 is necessary for all official documents. So it follows that mental maturity occurs after the age of 18. Fortunately, under the new criminal law in Iran, deciding the age of the accused is based on the findings of medical examiners. I had a case where the defendant had committed murder when he was 14 years and 11 months old. The High Commission of Forensic Medicine also decided that he was not mentally mature. Nevertheless, he was condemned to “retribution”. Isn’t this breaking the law?
Retribution is not necessarily the same as execution. Retribution is requested by the victim’s next of kin, whereas execution is ordered by the public prosecutor and has no private plaintiff. Does the new Iranian penal code pay more attention to reducing the number of executions or the volume of retributions?
First I should point out that when we let our minds be caught between execution and retribution, the necessity for serious cultural changes becomes clear. Execution is a general word for legal killing. Each country, depending on its culture and laws, does it in its own way. For example, the United States uses lethal injection, Saudi Arabia uses swords and Sudan uses firearms. In Iran, depending on the judge, the execution is done by hanging, stoning to death or, sometimes, firearms. The difference between the terms “retribution” and “execution” is that the first one is decided by the next of kin and the second one by the government.
As long as the idea of revenge has value and validity in our society, the death penalty will remain.
How do you judge the new Islamic penal code in Iran?
Some positive steps about the death penalty for children have been taken. It has put new limitations in place and takes mental maturity into account. Nevertheless, the aim is to abolish the death penalty. What is being done for children should be extended to all death penalty cases.
Do you believe that, some day, the death penalty will be banished from Iran?
Yes. My experience tells me that it can be done, but we must employ the right methods. Methods used by human rights organizations are not right and even in the short term it does not help. There are no organizations that work on individual defendants, analyzing the specific case and supporting the accused from the time of arrest. About a week before the execution, they speak out and make a lot of noise.
Why do some children who are condemned to death get so much attention while others are executed in silence?
Nobody cares more than the family. Those who die in silence don’t have family support. Some don’t have a family at all. In recent months, I have been contacted to help people who have been condemned to death on political charges, mostly ethnic Arabs or Kurds. I have asked for contact information about their families so I can help them directly, but I have received no telephone numbers or email addresses. Usually, the defendants who have no families or who are not supported by their families are more likely to be executed.
After three years living outside of Iran, how do you rate the role of human rights organizations in other countries?
Frankly, I have a lot of criticisms. I have worked for years against the death penalty and have met 300 people were condemned to death. I give myself the right to be very angry at theses organizations’ performance. I praise people who are sincerely and devotedly trying to save human lives, but the life of a person must not become a tool for an organization to make material gains. You should not play with human life.
In Iran, I cooperated with many organizations, including Amnesty International. They received information from me, but the moment that I left Iran, they never contacted me, not even to use my years of experience. The only thing that they do is to issue statements and write letters, without doing anything useful. Every time that I read a report by a news agency or a political party that describes the conditions of a condemned prisoner as told by his family, I become depressed because I think they are using it as a tool against the Islamic Republic. It is stupid and inhuman to abuse a human life.
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