LGBT Republic of Iran: An Online Reality?
3.2. Persecution
3.3. Punishment
There have been a few exceptions to this. On 7 September 2011 Saeed Kamali Dehghan reported for the Guardian that three gay Iranian men had been executed in the southwest city
of Ahvaz. This time there were no additional charges or exag-
gerated claims (Dehghan 2011). Dehghan quoted from a press release published by a national Iranian news agency, which
is thus representative of the official standpoint of the Irani-
an government: “The three convicts were sentenced to death
based on Articles 108 and 110 of Iran‘s Islamic penal code, for acts against the Sharia law and bad deeds” (Dehghan 2011).
punishment
3.3
// Although prevalent (based on the experiences and obser-
vations of our consultants) and relatively easy to enter into if you have the propensity, acts of intimacy between same-sex
partners can result in severe punishments such as flogging and, in some cases, the death penalty. While there are no official sta-
tistics concerning exactly how many gay men and women have been executed in Iran, the routine harassment of homosexuals and their systematic torture lends weight to the conservative
estimate that at least 1,000 homosexual Iranians have been 8
There are no official records
detailing how many homosexual Iranians have been
executed since the Islamic Re-
public of Iran was established. Unofficial estimates range
convicted and sentenced to death since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.8
In December 2010 Human Rights Watch published the report
“We are a buried generation”, which outlines a number of infringements on the human rights of LGBT Iranians.9
from 400 to 5,000 but there
of these is closer to the truth.
such a matter, but LGBT Iranians are also frequently prosecu-
is no way of knowing which
// Not only is it extremely unlikely that Iran’s ultraconservative
government would ever release official statistics concerning
ted on trumped up charges of rape, fraud, or treason in order
to ‘justify’ their executions. This means that it is impossible to