A/HRC/40/24 I. Introduction 1. The present report is submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 73/181, in which the Secretary-General was requested to submit an interim report on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Human Rights Council at its fortieth session. The report provides information on progress made in the implementation of the resolution. It draws on observations made by the United Nations human rights treaty bodies, the special procedures of the Human Rights Council and various United Nations entities. It also reflects information from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, State media and non-governmental organizations and from individual interviews with known victims and alleged victims and their families and with lawyers. The Secretary-General acknowledges the detailed submission provided by the Government in response to the draft of the present report. 2. The Secretary-General notes that the Government has increasingly engaged with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and with United Nations human rights mechanisms. Representatives of OHCHR visited Tehran in May 2018 and met with a range of interlocutors to discuss the human rights situation in the country. The Government has extended an invitation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and to three special procedure mandate holders. II. Overview of the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran A. Death penalty and right to a fair trial Use of the death penalty and the amendment to the drug trafficking law 3. According to article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, States parties that have not yet abolished the death penalty should only impose it for the “most serious crimes”, which has been interpreted as meaning those involving intentional killing.1 The Secretary-General remains concerned by the continued application of the death penalty for a wide range of offences, including those which are vague or uncertain in scope, such as efsad-e fel-arz (“spreading corruption on earth”),2 and those which do not involve intentional killing and therefore do not amount to “most serious crimes”, such as adultery3 or consensual sexual relations between two men in certain circumstances. 4 4. Information received by OHCHR indicates that 207 persons were executed in the Islamic Republic of Iran between January and October 2018,5 compared to 437 recorded during the same period in 2017. This decline may have resulted from the amendment to the drug trafficking law which entered into force in November 2017 and which replaced the mandatory death penalty with a prison term of up to 30 years (retroactively and prospectively) for non-violent drug-related offences. While mandatory death sentences for numerous drug-related offences were retained, the amendment increased the quantity of drugs required for a death sentence to be imposed. The amended law still criminalizes addiction and transforms some crimes into capital crimes for first-time offenders in specific circumstances. 6 United Nations human rights mechanisms have consistently underscored 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 See Human Rights Committee, general comment No. 36 (2018) on the right to life. See the report of the Secretary-General on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, available from www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session37/Pages/ ListReports.aspx; and A/73/398, para. 23. Penal Code, arts. 136 and 225. Ibid., art. 235. See https://iranhr.net/en/articles/3514/. Drug trafficking law, arts. 8 and 45.