Iran to Bring Back Death Sentence for Apostasy
Iran is poised to re-introduce the death penalty for apostasy, the crime of the rejection of Islam by word or deed by someone who has been a Muslim. According to sharia Law, all Muslim men who change their religion must suffer execution.
Last month the Iranian parliament voted by 196 votes to 7 in favour of a draft bill called the Islamic Penal Code which would officially codify the death penalty for Iranian men who have left the Islamic faith. Female apostates would be given life imprisonment.
The new law requires another vote in the Iranian parliament and then the signature of the Ayatollah to become law. But given the overwhelming vote in favour of the draft bill and the promotion of the bill by Iranian clerics, it is thought that the law could come into force in a matter of weeks.
The last person to be executed for apostasy in Iran was Hossein Soodman who was hanged in 1990. The first Iranian who could be executed under the re-introduction of the death penalty is Soodman’s son, Rashin, a 29 year old Iranian Christian. He was arrested in August and has yet to be charged, fuelling fears by his family that he may be executed when the new law comes in as a high profile warning to other Iranian Christians.
There are an estimated 10,000 Christians in Iran and several hundred followers of the Baha’i faith, a religion founded in Iran in 1863.
The right to freedom of religion is one of the most basic human rights in the modern era, written in stone in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and in the European Convention of Human Rights.
Yet the response to the sinister developments in Iran from the “International Community” has been decidedly muted. The normally vocal United Nations have made no pronouncement on the situation. Neither has the European Union, and in fact Iran’s largest foreign trading partner, Germany, has just increased its business deals with Iran by more than half.
In sharia law, the sentence for apostasy is unequivocal: execution. With the ever increasing appeasement of Islam and the recent establishment of official sharia law courts in London, Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, Nuneaton and Scotland, will we soon see the day when Islamic courts in Great Britain are calling for the execution of apostates?
