Daniel
2010-07-05 00:29:52
An Iranian woman faces death by stoning after being convicted of adultery.
Amnesty International yesterday called on the Iranian authorities to halt the imminent execution of mother-of-two Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani and the hanging of another woman said to be a political activist.
Ashtiani was convicted of having an ‘illicit relationship’ with two men in May 2006 and received 99 lashes as her sentence.
Despite this, she has also been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning.
The 43-year-old has retracted a ‘confession’ she said was made under duress.
Appealing for help to the international community, her daughter, Farideh, 16, and son, Sajad, 20, said yesterday: ‘Please help end this nightmare and do not let it turn into a reality. Help us save our mother.’
Under Iran’s Islamic penal code, adultery is punishable by stoning to death or flogging, while hanging is the penalty for murder and other crimes such as drug trafficking.
Stoning sentences were widely carried out after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, but have been rare in recent years.
Men killed in this way are buried to the waist, while women are buried deeper, to stop the stones hitting their breasts.
If a prisoner manages to pull free during a stoning, he or she is acquitted or jailed, but is not executed. It is easier for a man to drag himself free because he is not buried so deeply.
In December 2008 a man convicted of adultery escaped death by stoning by dragging himself out of the pit he had been buried in for the punishment.
But two other alleged male adulterers were killed by the barbaric method in the same incident, which took place in the north-eastern city of Mashhad.
Iranian activists against stoning say it is not prescribed in the Koran.
Iran has the highest execution rate in the world.
Amnesty International has recorded 126 executions between January and June – among them five political prisoners.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1291166/Iranian-mother-faces-death-stoning-convicted-adultery.html
I hate countries that base their penalties around religion…
Update 8/06/2010: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/save-my-wife-stoning-lawyer-mohammad-mostafaie-pleads/story-e6frfku0-1225902269515?from=public_rss
THE human rights lawyer forced to flee Iran for defending a woman sentenced to death by stoning has appealed for international pressure to save his client and end his own wife’s imprisonment.
Speaking from the Turkish detention center where he is being held while his asylum application is considered, Mohammad Mostafaie said that he feared Turkey could still extradite him to preserve its close relations with the regime in Tehran.
He broke down when asked about his decision to leave behind his wife and seven-year-old daughter, saying that the subject was too painful for him to talk about. He was adamant that he would remain in exile until the rule of law was restored in Iran.
He insisted, however, that he had no regrets about his decision to broadcast the plight of his client, Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, to the world even though it had destroyed his former existence.
“I have no regrets at all. I would do it all over again, even if I’m forced to live outside Iran,” he said. “A lawyer is duty-bound to defend his client no matter what. If someone in Iran wants to be a lawyer they have to be prepared to go all the way, even if it means losing their life.”
Mostafaie’s defense of Mohammadi-Ashtiani, who already endured 99 lashes and five years’ imprisonment for alleged adultery, infuriated the regime.
Two weeks ago he went into hiding after a warrant was issued for his arrest, so the authorities took his wife hostage. He fled overland to Turkey, was arrested for entering that country illegally and is now being held in the Kumkapi detention centre in Istanbul while his asylum application is processed.
Mostafaie said he had no idea why he was not allowed to leave Turkey when he had a visa for countries of the EU’s Schengen area and Norway offered him residency. Nor did he know why he was being held when other Iranian refugees were allowed to live freely in Turkey while their asylum applications were reviewed.
The lawyer said it was “absolutely vital” that he did not turn himself in to secure his wife’s freedom. “They took my wife hostage to get hold of me. If I’d surrendered in that situation they would think they could do that to anyone. They’d go after the families of anyone they wanted to assist them.”
In Geneva yesterday, Mossadegh Kahnemoui, a senior Iranian judicial official, told a United Nations human rights committee that Mohammadi-Ashtiani's case was still under review and insisted, despite documentary evidence to the contrary, that she had been convicted of murdering her husband as well as adultery.
Update 12/08/2010: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/iran-stoning-woman-confesses/story-e6frfku0-1225904616703?from=public_rss
AN Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning has confessed to being an accomplice to the murder of her husband, according to an interview aired on state television.
The interview was with a woman in a face-covering chador whom the report said was Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two whose death sentence has drawn outcry from many countries.
It was aired last night during a political broadcast that denounced the "propaganda of Western media" about the case it said was being used to pressure Iran over its controversial nuclear program.
In it, the woman said to be Mohammadi-Ashtiani admitted that a man with whom she was acquainted had offered to kill her husband and that she let him carry out the crime.
Her remarks were made in Azeri and translated into Persian.
The chief justice of East Azerbaijan province, where the alleged crime took place in 2006, told the TV show that Mohammadi-Ashtiani injected her husband with a substance that made him unconscious before the killer electrocuted him.
Iranian officials have maintained that the sentence was for murder, although initial reports said she was acquitted of that and only convicted for "having an illicit relationship outside marriage".
Her stoning sentence has been temporarily suspended by Iranian judiciary chief Sadeq Larijani.
Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim on Wednesday urged Iran to make a "humanitarian gesture" towards the woman, stressing it would be good for the image of the Islamic republic.
Mohammadi-Ashtiani's lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaie, fled to Norway after Iranian officials issued an arrest warrant for him and detained his wife.
The human rights lawyer, who says he has rescued 18 of 40 clients from the death penalty in Iran in recent years, said he was considering seeking asylum in the Scandinavian country.
Update 5/09/2010: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/iran-stoning-woman-to-get-99-lashes/story-e6frfku0-1225914327225?from=public_rss
SAKINEH Mohammadi-Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, has also been sentenced to 99 lashes for a photo published of her without a headscarf, according to her son.
In an interview published on the website of the French magazine La Regle du Jeu and the blog Dentelles et Tchador, Mohammadi-Ashtiani's son Sajjad said they learned of the new punishment from released inmates.
He said that a prison judge confirmed that she was to be lashed for spreading "corruption and indecency" by the publication of a photograph of her without a headscarf that appeared in a British newspaper.
The Times of London published on August 28 a photo of a woman without a headscarf that it said was Mohammadi-Ashtiani, however on September 3 it said the attribution of the photo, which it received from one of her lawyers that has fled Iran, was incorrect.
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The photo "… is certainly not that of my mother", said Sajjad.
Mohammadi-Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, was given the death penalty for an extramarital relationship.
Iran has subsequently said she was also convicted of being an accomplice in her husband's death, though she has denied that was the case.
Her plight has prompted protests in Europe and an international campaign to spare her. Tehran has provisionally suspended the death sentence.
Update 28/09/2010: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/iran-stoning-case-woman-to-be-hanged-for-murder/story-e6frfku0-1225931250929?from=public_rss
THE Iranian woman who became the centre of an international outcry after being sentenced to death by stoning for adultery will now be hanged for murdering her husband.
The new fate planned for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was announced by Iran’s national prosecutor general, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, at a news conference in Tehran today.
“According to the court’s ruling, she is convicted of murder and her death sentence has priority over her punishment [for committing adultery]”, the Tehran Times reported, citing Mohseni-Ejei.
The newspaper said that the prosecutor’s remarks mean Ashtiani - an illiterate 43-year-old Azeri mother of two whose husband was killed by her cousin - will not be stoned to death for committing adultery because she should first be executed for murder.
“The issue should not be politicised and the judiciary will not be influenced by the propaganda campaign launched by the Western media,” added Mohseni-Ejei, who also serves as the judiciary spokesman.
However the Iranian government today appeared to contradict Mohseni-Ejei's statements by claiming that no final decision had yet been taken in the case.
“The judicial process has not yet finished and the final judgement will be announced after the end of the process,” said foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast.
Ashtiani has spent years in prison under threat of being stoned for alleged adultery with her cousin.
She has been denied access to her family and lawyer, who were persecuted for publicising her case. The strength of the outcry in the West has been credited with delaying the sentence.
The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly tackled about Ashtiani’s case when he visited New York last week to address the United Nations.
In contradiction to his country’s judicial officials, Ahmadinejad denied that Ashtiani had ever been sentenced to death by stoning and suggested that the international outcry had been whipped up by Western media propaganda.
“There’s no stoning case here at all,” he told Larry King Live. “A person in Germany made this claim, which was untrue. Our judiciary also said it was untrue.”
On the day of Ahmadinejad’s address an open letter was released from Ashtiani’s son to Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, begging him to intervene to save his mother’s life, dismissing the Islamic Republic’s professed commitment to human rights as an “absolute lie” and calling for an international ban on stoning.
Sajad Ghaderzade, 22, a bus driver from Tabriz, said that his mother had been acquitted of murdering her husband but sentenced to be stoned to death after being convicted, instead, of adultery.
The statement by the prosecutor general suggested that the courts have overturned their earlier judgment.
Mohseni-Ejei also threatened that the Iranian authorities were ready to prosecute the leaders of the Iranian opposition, Mahdi Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, if they did not stop criticising the regime.
“The leaders of sedition have undermined the interests of the nation and system. Undoubtedly, they will be tried if they don’t repent their actions and express their regret publicly,” he said.