🔸 Children on the death row waiting list; turning 18, the end?

🔻A report by Atfeh Chaharomaliyan

Is a child who is executed after turning 18—while behind prison bars, caught in the upheaval of life and death—no longer a executed child? This question stands behind the names of many teenagers who have been detained, sentenced, and executed in recent years in Iran; children whose identity-card ages sometimes made their years of waiting longer, and in other cases even failed to be a barrier to the death sentence descending on the throats of their youth.

A brief reference to these recent months brings us to familiar names whose graves are still fresh: from Hamidreza Azari, who was executed at 17, to Amir Norollahi, Amirhossein Hatami, and Meysam Irandegani, who were executed at 18—while the charge brought against Irandegani was attributed to a time when he was 14.

Based on reports by human rights institutions, as of August 4, 1405 (2026), at least 184 teenagers among those detained in the uprising of Dey are still being held in prison; at least 14 of them face death sentences, two have been executed, and there remains a danger that the death sentence will be carried out against 12 other teenagers. According to a joint statement by “Defenders of Children’s Rights in Iran” and the “Center for Justice for Children,” more than one hundred other teenagers across Iran are awaiting the execution of a death sentence.

The statement also reports the use of charges such as “moharebeh” and “efsad-e fel arz” against children and teenagers, courts that lack minimum standards of fair trial, long and unlawful interrogations, security pressures, and torture in a number of these cases; a process which, according to the signatories, in some instances has led to forced confessions, and these confessions and fabricated scenarios by security apparatuses have served as the basis for issuing and carrying out death sentences.

Behind these figures and names, however, a fundamental question stands: if a person is detained as a teenager and executed after reaching the age of 18, can their reaching adulthood erase the age at which that person was detained as a child at the time the accusation was made? This report, in a conversation with two experts, has gone to examine that gap and its outcome.