sentenced to death for allegedly renouncing Islam, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI).
Youcef Nadarkhani, a 32-year-old member of the Church of Iran ministry and pastor of an approximately 400-person congregation in the northern city of Rasht, faces death.
“This is part of a greater trend of persecution against Christians,” said Firouz Sadegh-Khanjani, a member of the Church of Iran’s Executive Council.
ICHRI said that on September 22, Iran’s 11th Circuit Criminal Court of Appeals for Gilan Province upheld the conviction and death sentence on Nadar-khani for apostasy.
Apostasy is the “act of renouncing one’s religion,” the human rights group said Tuesday, but it “is not a crime under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code. Instead, the presiding judge in Nadarkhani’s case rested his opinion on texts by Iranian religious scholars.”
“It is the low point of any judicial system to sentence a person to death outside of its own legal framework,” said Aaron Rhodes, a spokesman for the campaign.
“To execute someone based on the religion they choose to practice or not practice is the ultimate form of religious discrimination and disregard for the freedom of conscience and belief.”
The judgment said Nadar-khani was born to Muslim parents but converted to Christianity when he was age 19 and that “during interrogations Nadar-khani made a written confession admitting he left Islam for Christianity.”
The accused said during his trial that his “interrogators pressured him into making the statement,” ICHRI said.
“I am not an apostate…. Prior to 19 years old, I did not accept any religion,” Nadarkhani said at the trial,.
Nadarkhani said he was coaxed by an interrogator into thinking “that a person who is born to Muslim parents, and does not accept a religion other than Islam before reaching the religious maturity age [15 for males], is automatically a Muslim.”
Nadarkhani’s attorney filed an objection to the sentence Sunday with Iran’s Supreme Court.
Two articles in the Constitution grant Christians “the right to freely worship and form religious societies” and “obligate the Iranian government to uphold the equality and human rights of Christians.”
The judge based his decision on constitutional provisions and Revolutionary Court “civil procedures that instruct judges to consult sources when there is no codified law that addresses a matter,” according to ICHRI.
There is also a part of the penal code allowing “judges to draw upon their personal knowledge when adjudicating cases.” Critics in Iran have long said this provision allows a judge to convict on little more than whim.
“More and more, the Iranian judiciary is departing from any recognized form of due process, issuing arbitrary judgments based on vague, open-ended laws,” said Rhodes. “Laws and evidence are increasingly irrelevant and unrelated to judicial outcomes in Iran.”
Leonard Leo, chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), said the “draconian language in the verdict makes it very clear that the Iranian authorities mean business. He could be executed at any time. And for what? For being a Christian.”
USCIRF officials said the last known execution of a Christian in Iran for apostasy was 20 years ago this month.
The Rev. Hossein Sood-mand—a Muslim who converted to Christianity in 1964 and served as a pastor in the Evangelical Christian Church—was arrested and charged with apostasy and insulting Islam as a result of his own conversion and efforts to convert other Muslims. He was hanged in December 1990.
Also, there have been executions of people of the Baha’i faith in Iran, including one charged with apostasy in 1998, the officials said.
Another Christian minister’s lawyer, Mahmud Taravatrooy, told ICHRI his office asked some senior clerics to issue opinions on apostasy under Islam.
Four ayatollahs, including the late Grand Ayatollah Hos-sain-Ali Montazeri, said that converting from Islam to one of the Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, is not construed as apostasy and the convert “should be treated the same way as people of other religions would be,” Taravatrooy said.