Juvenile offender Salar Shadizadi has been rescheduled for execution on Saturday 28 November

Juvenile offender Salar Shadizadi has been rescheduled for execution on Saturday 28 November, despite the prohibition on the use of the death penalty against juvenile offenders under international law and standards, and his right to be granted a re-trial 

under Iran’s own domestic law.

Salar Shadizadi, now aged 24, was sentenced to death by Branch 11 of the Provincial Criminal Court of Gilan Province in December 2007 for stabbing his childhood friend. He was 15 years old at the time. The sentence was upheld by Branch 37 of the Supreme Court in March 20 08 and approved by the Head of the Judiciary in May 2013. Since then, the authorities have twice scheduled the execution and later postponed it. They have, however, failed to take the steps necessary to ensure that Salar Shadizadi is granted a re-trial, even though the General Board of Iran’s Supreme Court has ruled that all those on death row for crimes committed when they were under 18 are entitled to receive a re-trial based on the new juvenile sentencing provisions of Iran’s 2013 Islamic Penal Code.

Salar Shadizadi was arrested in February 2007 and charged with the murder of a friend when he was 15 years old. He was not granted access to a lawyer at the investigative stage and was only allowed to retain a lawyer when his case was sent to court for trial. He says that he was also tortured and otherwise ill-treated during the investigative stage. In a will letter written from prison in November 2015, Salar Shadizadi has revealed, for the first time, how he unintentionally caused the “catastrophic” death of his childhood friend by unintentionally stabbing a frightening moving object, covered in green cloth, in the dark, which he then realized to be his deceased friend. He writes that this happened in the context of a “silly game” where his friend had dared him to go to their family garden at night, knowing that Salar Shadizadi was afraid of the dark and had been warned by his grandmother since childhood that the garden is haunted by “evil spirits” (jen). The execution of Salar Shadizadi was scheduled on 1 August 2015 but was postponed at the last minute, possibly as a result of international pressure.