Stop The Stoning

The Iranian woman accused of adultery may be stoned to death today. If you want to add your voice to those asking for the sentence to be commuted, click here.

Iran has given her prison permission to carry out her death sentence, The International Committee against Executions (ICAE) has discovered. However, there is a chance that she will be hanged to avoid the international condemnation that would come with a stoning.

“The probability of Sakineh’s imminent execution is now very high,” ICAE said.

Sakineh Mohammadi e Ashtiani has already received 99 lashed and spent 5 years in jail.

Her story is odd. She was charged with adultery and found not guilty. Then her husband died. She was brought before the court for his murder and found not guilty of killing him, but the judge decided that she was now guilty of adultery and needed to be stoned to death.

So why does she have to die while the man convicted of murdering her husband is allowed to live? Sakineh believes it is because of sexism:

• The answer is quite simple, it’s because I’m a woman, it’s because they think they can do anything to women in this country. It’s because for them adultery is worse than murder — but not all kinds of adultery: an adulterous man might not even be imprisoned but an adulterous women is the end of the world for them. It’s because I’m in a country where it’s women do not have the right to divorce their husbands and are deprived of their basic rights.

The news of the death sentence comes only a few days after it was announced that Iran was set to join the new agency, UN Women.