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By: ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG COMMENTS
 
A photo of two teenaged males being hanged in Iran last week swept across the Internet with claims they were executed for being gay.
The Human Rights Campaign, a Washington, D.C.-based gay rights group, released a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeating the allegations and urging her to intervene. The U.K.-based gay rights group Outrage, as well as Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht, condemned the hangings.
But the circumstances that triggered the executions are now being questioned by several human rights groups, which claim the teenagers, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, may not have been killed for being gay.
Research conducted by the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has found, so far, that the teenagers were convicted of and executed for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old male, a crime that occurred when the two teens may have been minors.
Asgari’s lawyer, Rohollah Razaz Zadeh, told the Associated Press that Iranian courts are supposed to commute death sentences handed to children to five years in jail.
“The judiciary has trampled its own laws,” Razaz Zadeh told AP.
But the lawyer said Iran’s Supreme Court upheld the verdict and allowed the execution despite his objections.
It appears that reports claiming the boys were executed for being gay originated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group that is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Accounts of the executions on gay news Web sites referenced reports by the group and its English language news site, www.iranfocus.com.
IGHRC, Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have not yet uncovered evidence that the charges were trumped up, officials with those groups said. Asgari and Marhoni also reportedly received 228 lashings while in detention for drinking and theft.
The human rights groups note that Iran’s execution and torture of the teenagers remains appalling, no matter the circumstances.
“It was not a gay case,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, taking issue with the Human Rights Campaign’s statement that was quick to condemn the execution as anti-gay.
“We would welcome HRC’s involvement in demanding that our government speak out on human rights violations. It was just the wrong case,” she said.
Ettelbrick said she was also disturbed by the racially charged language used by some gay rights groups to condemn the execution, such as when Peter Tatchell of Outrage said in a statement, “This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran.”
HRC received their information on the executions in Iran primarily from news reports Thursday and Friday, according to Steven Fisher, the group’s communications director. An investigation to determine the truth is still needed, he said.
“We don’t give one of the most secretive, aggressive nations the benefit of the doubt,” Fisher said. “We would be relieved if reports are erroneous that these young Iranian men were punished for something that should never be a crime in any nation.”
Congressman Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House International Relations Committee, blasted the executions as violations of Iran’s obligations under international law and signs of bias against gays.
“This sickening episode shines a bright light on the severe shortcomings of the Iranian legal system,” Lantos said in a statement. “No matter what legal sources or traditions a country bases its law upon, there is no justification for whipping and executing people amid an angry mob — particularly not when the convicts committed offenses while they were minors, who are specifically protected under international law.
“And in this case, authorities apparently chose to play on deep-seated feelings of bigotry toward homosexuality, which can carry the death penalty in Iran,” he added.
Noel Clay, a State Department spokesperson, said Wednesday afternoon that there were no plans to release an official statement about the executions, but the department did release a general statement about the Iranian justice system:
“We remain concerned about Iran’s judicial process. Defendants are not receiving due process of law, and trials lack procedural safeguards.
“As noted in our country reports on human rights practices, the judge and the prosecutor are the same person, trials are frequently held in closed sessions without access to a lawyer and the right of appeal is not often honored.
“We call upon the government of Iran to vigorously pursue prison reform, cooperate with international investigations of human rights cases and respect international human rights law and practice,” the ...
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