19-year-old teenager hanged for gay sex in Iran

A teenage boy has been executed in Iran on charges of raping another boy, although there are claims that the sex was actually consensual.

Amnesty International has reported that Hassan Afshar, 19, was hanged in Arak’s Prison in Markazi Province on 18 July, after being convicted of “lavat-e be onf” (forced male to male anal intercourse) in early 2015.

The execution went ahead even though the Office of the Head of the Judiciary had promised his family that they would review the case on 15 September 2016.

“Afshar was a 17-year-old high school student when he was arrested. He had no access to a lawyer and the judiciary rushed through the investigation and prosecution, convicting and sentencing him to death within two months of his arrest as though they could not execute him quickly enough,” commented Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Programme Director at Amnesty International.

Afshar was arrested in December 2014 after the authorities received a complaint accusing him and two other youths of forcing a teenage boy to have sexual intercourse with them.

Afshar insisted that the sexual acts were consensual and that the complainant’s son had willingly engaged in same-sex sexual activities before.

Amnesty noted that the legal system was stacked against the youth: If the intercourse in this case had been deemed consensual, the teenager who accused Afshar of rape would himself have been sentenced to death under the law.

Male individuals who engage in same-sex anal intercourse face different punishments under Iranian criminal law depending on whether they are the “active” or “passive” partners and whether their conduct is characterised as consensual or non-consensual.

If the conduct is deemed consensual, the “passive” partner of same-sex anal conduct shall be sentenced to the death penalty. The “active” partner, however, is sentenced to death only if he is married, or if he is not a Muslim and the “passive” partner is a Muslim.

If the intercourse is deemed non-consensual, the “active” partner receives the death penalty but the “passive” partner is exempted from punishment and treated as a victim.

This legal framework risks creating a situation where willing “recipients” of anal intercourse may feel compelled, when targeted by the authorities, to characterise their consensual sexual activity as rape in order to avoid the death penalty, said Amnesty.

Afshar’s execution is similar to that of Mahmoud Asgari, 16, and Ayaz Marhoni, 18, on July 19, 2005. While the Iranian government stated that they were executed for raping a 13-year-old boy, British LGBT activists claimed that they were killed for consensual homosexual acts.

Amnesty pointed out that even if the latest incident had involved non-consensual sex, execution is not an acceptable punishment, especially for those who were under age at the time of the alleged crime.

“Iran has proved its sickening enthusiasm for putting juveniles to death, in contravention of international law,” said Mughrabi.

There are 60 individuals who remain on death row in prisons across Iran for crimes allegedly committed when they were under 18.