Painting Exhibition By Iranian Death Row Prisoner Delara Darabi Protests Her Innocence

As art exhibitions go, the paintings on display this week at Tehran's Golestan Gallery are hardly designed to uplift the human spirit.

The visitor is greeted by a harrowing collection of mostly monochrome images, starkly conveying the soul-destroying effects of captivity. Barbed wire and barred windows, unmistakable symbols of imprisonment and separation, are everywhere.

But as dispiriting as they are, the grim portraits are designed to seize the attention and prompt an active response.

The artist currently sits on death row. All but one of the three dozen or so works by Delara Darabi have been painted in a prison cell while she waits for the authorities to confirm a death sentence, handed down for the murder of a rich elderly relative. Some have been painted with her fingers after she ran out of paintbrushes. All show a haunting self-awareness of her predicament and the sense of loss imposed by her imprisonment and coming fate. But most of all, they carry an over-powering message of injustice.

This is expressed with startling clarity in one painting of a young woman's ravaged face. On close inspection, the scales of justice can be seen in the right eye. It tells the visitor that the exhibition has a higher purpose than the artist's traditional pre-occupation with self-expression. It is about Delara asserting that she is innocent.

"The paintings in front of you are not wordless images and colours, they are the painful photo realities of our life," she writes in a stream-of-consciousness message pinned to the gallery wall. "The only face I see in front of me every day is a wall. For three years, I have been defending myself with colours, forms and words. These paintings are an oath to a crime I did not commit. Unless the colours bring me back to life, I greet you who have come to view my paintings from behind that wall."

It may be the most unusual challenge to Iran's heavily criticised penal code, with its highly controversial use of the death penalty. But Delara's supporters hope the exhibition's novelty will raise public awareness and persuade the judiciary to overturn her conviction.

"In Iran, many incidents and events are just kept silent and people don't hear about them," said Asiyeh Amini, a women's rights campaigner who organised the exhibition. "We want to put Delara as a young artist under the public gaze to get people's attention focused on her. When she was doing these paintings, she had no aim of having an exhibition. Her only aim was to express herself. But we want to draw the attention of decision-makers to her situation. This young, pretty and emotional girl has been exposed to the cruelest of experiences."

Now aged 20, Delara was convicted and sentenced in a children's court three years ago after confessing to stabbing to death her father's cousin, a 65-year-old woman. She subsequently retracted her confession and claimed her lover had committed the crime. He had carried it out for money, she said, saying they would need it if they were to marry. But he persuaded her to confess on the grounds that she would not face the death penalty because she was only 17, she claims.

If her story is true, it was a fateful error of judgment. Delara's death sentence has since been upheld by Iran's supreme court. Her lawyer, Abdulsamad Khoramshahi, is currently trying to have her conviction quashed on appeal, due to be heard over the next two months. He said the criminal investigation was incomplete and that her conviction was based solely on her confession.

A reconstruction of the crime scene would show that Delara could not have committed the murder. Innocent or not, the case bears one characteristic which human rights campaigners say is a dismaying hallmark of Iran's penal system. Being just 17 at the time of the murder should exempt Delara from the death penalty under the terms of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which forbid capital punishment for offences committed before the age of 18.

Last month, Human Rights Watch wrote to the head of Iran's judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, protesting about the presence on death row of several young people convicted of crimes committed as juveniles and demanding legislation to end the practice. Lawyers say Iran routinely masks its policy of executing juvenile offenders by waiting until they are over 18 before carrying out the sentence or by simply lying about their age.

Most of those put to death lack the artistic gifts of Delara Darabi, which might just serve to shame the authorities into mending their ways.