UN to fund Iran anti-drugs programme despite executions of offenders

The UN anti-drug agency is finalising a multimillion-dollar funding package, including European money, for Iran’s counter-narcotics trafficking programmes, despite the country’s high execution rate of drug offenders.

Iranian authorities have hanged at least two people a day this year for drug offences, according to the human rights group Reprieve, which works for the abolition of death penalty.

Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, also warned this week that the Islamic republic continues to execute more people per capita than any country. At least 753 people were hanged last year in Iran, of whom more than half were drug offenders.

Reprieve and a number of other organisations have repeatedly urged the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to stop funding Iran’s anti-narcotics campaign until Tehran ends its use of capital punishment for drug-related offences.

But despite their concerns, the UNODC is agreeing a new five-year deal with Iranian officials. Reprieve says its research shows that millions of dollars of support to Iran can be directly linked to the arrest and execution of thousands of people, including children. Iran has a notorious record of juvenile executions.

“Iran has hanged more than a hundred so-called drug offenders this year, and the UN has responded by praising the efficiency of the Iranian drug police and lining them up a generous five-year funding deal,” said Maya Foa, strategic director of Reprieve’s death penalty team.

“The lion’s share of this funding is set to come from European governments, who continue to condemn the death penalty while funding drug raids where those caught are hanged from cranes in public,” she said. “This is a costly and untenable hypocrisy, and the time has come for European countries to make their counter-narcotics assistance strictly conditional on the states which receive it abolishing the death penalty for drug offences.”

The UNODC confirmed to the Guardian that it was finalising a country partnership programme with Iran. The agency, however, refused to reveal which countries were contributing to the upcoming aid package.

“The funding is provided for two distinct areas,” said David Dadge of the UNODC. “The first is that we are strengthening the capacities to interdict the illicit drugs but the country partnership programme also has a very strong social component. The focus is on prevention and treatment and that’s got the support of numerous NGOs as well.”

Faced with human rights concerns, an increasing number of European countries have stopped funding the Iranian campaign, including the UK, Denmark and Ireland. France and Norway continue to fund, Reprieve said, but it was not clear if other countries that have previously given money, such as Italy, Norway and Belgium, were part of the new deal.

Iran is a neighbour to Afghanistan, a leading producer and supplier of the world’s drugs, and faces big challenges at home with a young population susceptible to a variety of cheap and abundant addictive drugs. Critics, however, say Iran’s use of death penalty in this regard has done little, if anything, to address the issue.

Reprieve, which has monitored Iran’s anti-drugs behaviour closely, said a 15-year-old Afghan boy, identified as Jannat Mir, was hanged in 2014 for allegedly moving heroin across the border from Afghanistan to Iran.

During the period the Afghan national was in Iranian custody, the UNODC was co-funding a $5.4m (£3.6m) project that included providing Iran with training to officers and drug detection dogs and vehicles, Reprieve said.

Danny Kushlick from the UK-based Transform Drug Policy Foundation said the application of the death penalty is the result of the policy of the global drug war that, he added, serves to dehumanise all those involved in the trade and use of prohibited drugs.

“The UNODC seems to be isolated and out of step with other UN agencies,” he said. “It is the responsibility of all member states to reassert the UN principles of security, development and human rights as the foundation of all programmes emerging from the UN.”