A/HRC/21/29 Secretary-General, in his report on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, welcomed the omission of punishment of stoning and details of this method of execution in the Code (A/HRC/19/82, para. 8). V. Use of the death penalty on children, persons with mental or intellectual disabilities and other vulnerable groups A. Children 47. Article 37 (a) of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which is in force in 193 States, reaffirms the internationally accepted standard50 that the death penalty cannot be imposed for a crime committed by a person who at that time was under 18 years of age, and stresses that “life imprisonment without possibility of release shall [not] be imposed” for such persons. 48. On 23 March 2012, the Human Rights Council adopted resolution 19/37 on the rights of the child. The resolution includes safeguards with regard to the right of juvenile offenders not to be sentenced to death and to be removed from death row; a rebuttable presumption of age in favour of juvenile offenders; and access of children of parents incarcerated on death row to their parents and to information concerning their parents’ status. 49. Despite the clear prohibition under international human rights law, some States continue to use the death penalty against persons below the age of 18 at the time of the alleged offence. The full overview of actual cases of executions of children, children on death row and children at high risk of receiving death penalty is not available due to the lack of available information and the lack of monitoring capacity of various actors. However, reportedly, executions of juveniles were carried out in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen during the reporting period. A boy, 17 years old at the time of execution, was publicly hanged on 21 September 2011 in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This was the third officially acknowledged execution of a juvenile offender, after two juvenile offenders had been executed in the southern port of Bandar Abbas in April 2011. In Saudi Arabia, Bandar bin Juza’ bin Rumaithan al-Luhaibi was executed on 10 October 2011. He was identified in a Ministry of Interior statement as a “juvenile”, but there is no indication of his age at the time of the alleged offence or the execution. In January 2012, the Attorney General in Yemen rejected final appeals against the death sentences for Fuad Ahmed Ali Abdulla and Muhammed Taher Thabet Samoum, both of whom possibly were under 18 years old when they allegedly committed their crimes in 1999 and 2004, respectively. Fuad Ahmed Ali Abdulla was executed in January 2012. 50. Sentencing of juveniles to death also continued in some States. In Sudan, two juvenile prisoners under 18 at the time of the alleged crimes were sentenced to death under the 2005 Terrorism Act and the Sudanese Criminal Act, and the sentences were subsequently upheld by the Special Criminal Court in North Darfur on 29 November 2011. In November 2011, the Supreme Court of the Islamic Republic of Iran approved the death penalty for a boy, who was only 16 when he committed alleged crimes of murder and robbery. 51. In her work, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children promotes the implementation of the recommendations of the United 50 See for example article 6, paragraph 5, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 13