Doug Henwood Talks

[hanging people from a crane so they take 10 minutes to choke to
death…lovely]

Financial Times - April 27, 2007

Lone challenger to Iran’s orthodoxy on the death penalty By Gareth Smyth in Tehran

It is hard to imagine a tougher cause in Iran than campaigning
against the death penalty, which has strong popular support and which
most religious authorities and politicians say is required by Islam.

Yet that is the task Emadeddine Baghi, a former journalist, has set
himself in establishing a non-governmental organisation called the
Association for the Right to Life. “I have to admit some people I
asked to support us, including well-known reformers, refused point
blank,” he says.

A report published today from Amnesty International puts Iran behind
only China in the world league of capital punishment with 177
executions in 2006, up from 94 in 2005. There is no single reason why
the total has increased, although observers talk broadly of a
clampdown on crime.

Iran’s favoured method is hanging from a crane, with death resulting
from choking, which can take 10 minutes. Mr Baghi says there are 42
people under 18 on death row and that more than a third of executions
last year were for crimes other than murder, including 28 for
adultery or homosexuality.

But Right to Life does claim successes - stopping eight executions in
two years, with one person freed, three facing life imprisonment and
four awaitingnews. Mr Baghi is hopeful over another 30 cases.

His arguments against the death penalty are based on a grounding in
Islamic law gained from religious studies in Tehran and Qom that Mr
Baghi gave up at 29 when he opted not to become a cleric.

“The Koran is clear,” he says, citing verse 178 of the Baqarah sura.
“It talks of punishment as a way to guarantee social stability. I
argue that a life sentence can have a better effect.”

Mr Baghi’s motivation in setting up an earlier NGO, Defending the
Rights of Prisoners, lay in a belief in independent organisations and
in a commitment to human rights. “All humans have rights,” he
insists, “including prisoners and murderers.”

Like many reformist intellectuals, Mr Baghi has his own prison story.
Sent to Evin jail in 1999 when the judiciary closed the Khordad
newspaper where he worked, he realised “ordinary” prisoners were
worse treated than political ones.

Mr Baghi pressed for the enforcement of prison rules, famously
organising fellow inmates to extract and weigh the meat in a large
pot of stew - to find it 2.5kg rather than the then 7kg stipulated
for 140 prisoners.

Prison gave Mr Baghi time to think. “I’d always thought our problems
were caused by authoritarian government, and that it should be
overthrown. You might expect experience of prison to strengthen this
belief but, instead, I realised the real problem was the lack of a
strong civil society.”

Defending the Rights of Prisoners, which has two waged staff,
survives on membership fees from 65 people, donations and a decision
by Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a cleric once designated as
successor to Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as supreme leader,
that it could accept religious dues.

Mr Baghi admits the NGO faces an uphill task. “We face the general
lack of an effective civil society coupled with the particular
disregard of the rights of prisoners.”

Another difficulty, he says, flows from US “intervention” in Iranian
affairs, which has fostered suspicion of independent groups.

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