Iran urged to prohibit execution by stoning

January 15, 2008 - (Toronto Star) Punishment for adultery under state penal code. The woman stands chest-high in a pit, surrounded by jeering onlookers. On a signal they will aim small stones at her head, taking care not to pick up any heavy enough to strike a fatal blow.

This is death by stoning in Iran, a deliberately slow, agonizing and primitive practice that was suspended by the country's judicial authorities, but continues today, according to Amnesty International.

In a report released today the human rights organization calls for Iran to "urgently" change the penal code to end death by stoning – a sentence that 11 people are now awaiting.

Reports from Iran say that the parliament may amend the code to allow suspension of at least some stoning sentences.

But Malcolm Smart, Amnesty's director of the Middle East and North Africa program, urged the authorities to "go much further, and take steps needed to ensure that the new penal code neither permits stoning to death nor provides for execution by other means for adultery."

The exceptional cruelty of the practice has embarrassed some in Iran's judiciary and clergy: the code currently says that the stones "should not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes," or small enough "so they could not be defined as stones."

In 2002, the head of Iran's cleric-dominated judiciary, Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi, called for a moratorium on stoning and ordered judges to find alternative methods of execution.

But the message hasn't reached Iran's remote areas, where many are illiterate and the law is administered by tradition.

"It isn't exclusively a religious matter," says Pat Maguire, Iran co-ordinator for Amnesty in Canada. "The state of Iran should adhere to international conventions as well as its own moratorium. It may require being more active in provincial affairs than in the past."

Under Iran's penal code, adultery is punishable by a law that cannot be changed. Stoning is the punishment and adultery is defined as a crime when one of an accused couple is married.

"Women suffer disproportionately," says the Amnesty report. "They are not treated equally before the law and courts ... and they are particularly vulnerable to unfair trials because they are more likely than men to be illiterate and therefore to sign confessions to crimes they did not commit."

The Iranian authorities have denied that stoning is still carried out.

From: http://www.thestar.com/article/294035