UK aid to Iran’s war on drugs has led to rise in hangings, UN warns

admin | 10/28/2012 | 0 Comments   Jamie Doward   The Observer,   Britain’s funding of Iran‘s anti-drugs trafficking programmes has been called into question

after a UN watchdog expressed alarm at a sharp rise in the number of narcotics smugglers executed in the Islamic state.   A new report by Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, spells out concerns that the flow of overseas aid to Iran has been followed by an increase in hangings.   Iran executed 10 drug traffickers in Tehran last Monday. The men were convicted of trafficking more than a tonne of opium and a tonne of methamphetamine.   The Observer reported last month that the UK was one of five donor countries that, via the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), gave Iran almost £2m to train sniffer dogs and buy specialised vehicles, satellite phones, drug-testing kits and body scanners to help combat drug smuggling. In 2009 the Foreign Office confirmed that it had spent more than £3m between 2000 and 2009 providing counter-narcotics assistance in Iran .   It is estimated that as many as 4,000 Afghans alone are on death row in Iran for drug offences. The UNODC has guidance stating that, if executions for drug-related offences continued, it would “have no choice but to employ a temporary freeze or withdrawal of support”. However, the report states that UNODC and some states are actively involved in Iran, “where more than 1,400 people have reportedly been executed since the beginning of 2010″.   The UN rapporteur warns that countries such as the UK that co-operate with countries that practise the death penalty for drug trafficking face “questions of complicity”. Rebecca Schleifer, advocacy director of the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, added: “Assistance to drug control efforts in countries with draconian drug laws, secret trials with no appeal, and death sentences for possession of small amounts of drugs raises serious concerns about complicity in violations of the right to life.”