May 26 – Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a death sentence for a man accused of being responsible for the death of an officer and injuring several other people during anti-government protests which have swept the country.
The charges against Mohammad Ghobalou have been strongly denied by his legal team, who said they had evidence showing that he has bipolar disorder, and was not in the area at the time of the incidents.
The lawyers said the court had ruled the documents inadmissible at the current stage of proceedings.
Child marriages in Iran rose sharply in 2022, according to data gathered by the Statistical Centre of Iran, a government body tasked with publishing national statistics on the country’s population.
The center held that more than 27,000 marriages involving girls under the age of 15 were recorded within a 12 month period between 2021 and 2022.
The increase in child marriages also corresponds with a rise in the number of babies born to girls. The latest report from Iran’s National Organization for Civil Registration recorded more than 69,000 babies born to girls between the ages of 10 and 19, of which almost 1,500 babies were born to girls between the ages of 10 and 14, in 2021.
And the grave of Jina Mahsa Amini was vandalized in Iran this week, according to an Instagram post published by her brother, Ashkan. The image accompanying the post showed that the glass protecting her tomb had been shattered.
Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who died while in police custody, sparked the country’s nationwide anti-government protests which began in September.
The lawyer for Amini’s family said the perpetrators were know to them, and that they had “done the same things in the past,” but did not give further details about the suspects.
