Jan. 14
IRAN:
Iran Stones 2 Men to Death; 3rd Flees----Sentences Carried Out Despite
Judicial Moratorium in 2002
2 men convicted of adultery in the northeastern city of Mashhad were
stoned to death in December, but a 3rd convicted man escaped while the
punishment was being carried out, a spokesman for Iran's judiciary said
Tuesday.
Ali Reza Jamshidi also said a moratorium on the controversial punishment,
announced in 2002 by the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi
Shahroudi, was an advisory rather than an edict.
"Judges can't act based simply on advisories by the head of the judiciary,
since judges are independent," he said, according to the semiofficial
Iranian Students' News Agency.
The European Union, the United Nations and human rights advocates inside
and outside Iran have decried stoning, which is enshrined in the country's
Islamic legal code as a punishment for homosexuality and adultery.
Condemned men are buried in sand up to their waists, and women up to their
necks, and are pelted with stones until they die or manage to escape.
Under the law, a condemned person's life is spared if he can free himself.
Shahroudi's 2002 comments had suggested Iran was moving away from the
practice. Since then, however, 5 people have been stoned after local
judges issued the sentence, human rights groups in Iran say. It is not
known how many people were stoned before the moratorium was announced.
Last August, the judiciary said that the lives of 4 people sentenced to
stoning had been spared and that the implementation of other sentences had
been halted pending a review of the cases. Ten people, including 8 women,
are now awaiting stoning, according to human rights activists.
"There was a very clear promise that there would be no more stonings,"
said Asieh Amini, an independent journalist who specializes in human
rights cases. "Today, the spokesperson says that judges can act
independently and that punishments were carried out since then. This shows
that even the word of the highest judicial authorities don't carry any
weight."
Jamshidi, the spokesman, said the judiciary is awaiting passage of a new
law in which "some circumstances for the stoning punishment have been
foreseen." He did not give a time frame. The bill does not call for the
abolition of stoning, he said, but specifies that the punishment not be
carried out if it insults the image of Islam.
Amini said the proposed legislation would do nothing to prevent stoning,
since it is unclear who would decide whether a particular sentence
reflects badly on Islam. "These stoning verdicts are an insult to Islam,
anyway," Amini said.
Jamshidi said the December stonings in Mashhad were carried out on two men
who had been convicted of having relationships with married women. "The
third man managed to escape from the pit," he said, adding that the man
had also been convicted of adultery. He gave no further information on the
man's fate.
On Monday, Shahroudi personally blocked the stoning of two married women,
saying video footage of them having sex with 2 men other than their
husbands was inconclusive, the Ettemaad newspaper, which is critical of
the government, reported Tuesday. Iran's Supreme Court had earlier upheld
the sentence.
In his weekly news conference, the judicial spokesman also said that Esha
Momeni, an Iranian American student at California State University at
Northridge who was detained in October, will not be allowed to leave the
country for at least another month, saying that "a new issue has turned up
in her case." He did not specify the issue.
Momeni was arrested after conducting video interviews with activists for
her master's thesis on women's rights. Authorities accused her of
"propagating against the system." She was released in November after
paying $200,000 bail but was not allowed to leave Iran.
(source: Washington Post)
******************
EU condemns Iran on recent stoning executions
The European Union today denounced the execution by stoning of 2 men in
Iran for adultery, and called on the Islamic Republic to end such
executions.
Irans Judiciary spokesperson, Alireza Jamshidi, today confirmed that 2 men
had been stoned to death in the northeastern city of Mashhad in December.
A 3rd man, identified as an Afghan national, had freed himself from the
hole, thus sparing his life, according to custom, the official IRNA news
agency reported.
"The European Union strongly condemns new cases of execution by stoning in
the Islamic Republic of Iran," said a statement issued by the Czech
Republic, the current head of the rotating EU presidency.
The EU also called on Iranian authorities to investigate the issue, "and
ensure that the practice of execution by stoning is effectively and
permanently terminated."
Under Iran's Islamic law, adultery is punishable by stoning, despite a
2002 directive by Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
imposing a moratorium on the punishment.
"These most recent executions not only go against the suspension, they
represent a worrying retrograde step," the EU statement read.
In stonings, men are buried to the waist and women to the chest, and
stones are hurled at them until they die. If a convict manages to free
himself from the hole, he is spared.
According to AFP, 5 Iranians have reportedly been stoned to death since
2005. The last reported instance was in July 2007.
International rights groups say Iran is violating its obligations under
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which forbids
cruel and inhumane punishment.
(sources: Presidency of the European Union website, IRNA, Agence
France-Presse)
*****************
Adulterer sentenced to death by stoning escapes pit and is freed
A MAN convicted of adultery has escaped death by stoning in Iran after
dragging himself out of the pit he had been buried in for the punishment
an act that means he is free under Islamic law. 2 other male adulterers
were killed by the barbaric method in the same incident, which took place
in the north-eastern city of Mashhad last month.
The stonings were confirmed yesterday by a spokesman for the judiciary,
which says it is trying to have the widely condemned punishment abolished.
Ali Reza Jamshidi said: "Given that the third person managed to pull
himself out of the hole, the verdict was not carried out."
The stonings were in defiance of repeated calls from the international
community for the Islamic Republic to abolish the practice.
John Watson, Amnesty International's Scotland programme director, told The
Scotsman: "Execution by stoning is a grotesque and unacceptable penalty
which Iran should abolish immediately. We urge the authorities to heed our
calls and those of the many Iranians who are fighting for an end to this
practice."
Preliminary figures from Amnesty indicate that more than 330 people were
executed in Iran in 2008.
Under Iranian law the stones must be neither too big nor too small, so
that death is neither mercifully quick nor endlessly prolonged. Some
stoning victims are said to have taken 20 minutes to die.
Stoning sentences usually imposed for adultery, which is sometimes
penalised by flogging were widely carried out in the early years after
Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, but have been very rare in recent years.
A moratorium on stoning was issued by Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, head of
the judiciary, in 2002. The European Union had made that measure and other
human rights reforms a condition for opening negotiations with Iran.
Despite the moratorium, a man convicted of adultery was stoned last year,
provoking international outrage. It was the 1st stoning confirmed by
Iran's judiciary in 5 years, although rights activists said a man and
woman were also stoned to death in 2006.
A group of Iranian lawyers, including Shadi Sadr, a prominent women's
rights activist, has been campaigning for years to have stoning as a
penalty removed from Iranian law.
But 8 women and 2 men are said to be on death row facing stoning
sentences. They are mostly illiterate and from underprivileged
backgrounds, and were condemned in the absence of a good defence, rights
activists said.
The majority of those stoned are women, who suffer disproportionately from
such punishment, human rights groups say. "One reason is that they are not
treated equally before the law and the courts, in clear violation of
international fair trial standard."
Also, men stoned to death are buried to the waist, while women are buried
deeper, to stop the stones from hitting their breasts. This apparent
regard for a woman's modesty actually has a negative impact for women. 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.
Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, apostasy,
blasphemy, serious drug trafficking, repeated sodomy, treason and
espionage.
BACKGROUND
GIVEN the dire punishment of stoning that is sometimes imposed for
adultery, high standards are supposedly set for proving the "crime".
4 witnesses to the sexual act are needed. These should be verifiably just
men. All four must have witnessed the "crime" simultaneously. Any giving
false testimony is subject to lashes.
Confessions by the defendant, repeated four times, can also secure a
conviction, but few confess, knowing they could be stoned for doing so. A
confession is also null and void if a person later disavows it.
But Iranian rights activists say confessions have been extracted under
duress and later disavowals rejected.
Iranian activists against stoning say it is not prescribed in the Koran.
(source: The Scotsman)
******************
2 prisoners hanged in public
2 prisoners were hanged in public by the mullahs' judiciary in Chamrun
Square in the southern city of Jahrom, reported the official daily Kayhan
on Tuesday.
The men were identified as Mojtaba R. and M.H.A.
On January 31, 2008, the mullahs' judiciary chief, Mahmoud Hashemi
Shahroudi, ordered death penalty should be carried out behind close doors.
"We have repeatedly seen that people expressed sympathy with the person
who was going to be hanged in public. People even expressed their
abhorrence at the execution of the sentence," said the assistant
prosecutor for sentences in Tehran's criminal prosecution office, the
state-run daily Javan reported on January 31, 2008.
"With far less expenditure, executions could be carried out in prison," he
added.
The state-run websites also admitted to the adverse effects of public
hangings and noted that the victims' gestures before being hanged deeply
affected the young people and left heroes image in their minds. These
websites regretted that in addition to generating hatred among people,
public hangings have also damaged the status of the regime in the world.
(source: National Council of Resistance of Iran - Foreign Affairs
Committee)
PHILIPPINES:
Solon says death penalty does not deter heinous crimes
North Cotabato 2nd District Rep. Bernardo Piol Jr. said he was against
moves by other lawmakers to restore the death penalty for cases involving
illegal drugs.
Piol said the government should impose corrective not vindictive measures
in addressing heinous crimes.
He said death penalty was imposed during the Estrada administration but
failed to curb the occurrence of heinous crimes.
The congressman cited the execution of Leo Echegaray, who was convicted
for raping his own daughter.
Echegaray was executed on February 5, 1999, 5 years after the death
penalty was revived as a deterrent to heinous crimes.
But the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA) reported
some 163 heinous crimes after Echegaray's execution.
Piol said those involved in illegal drugs and heinous crimes should be
given 2nd chance to renew their lives and atone for their wrongdoings in
jail instead of imposing death penalty.
He said the authority over life and death rests solely in God.
(source: Minda News)
SINGAPORE:
Stop executions: Amnesty
HUMAN rights watchdog Amnesty International on Wednesday asked Singapore
to make public 'comprehensive information' about its use of the death
penalty and again urged the government to stop executions.
Singapore's continued use of the death penalty for criminal offences,
including drug trafficking, goes against a global trend that has seen
several countries abolish capital punishment, Amnesty said in a statement.
'Amnesty International recognises the seriousness of these crimes and
supports all calls for justice,' the London-based watchdog said.
But it said it 'opposes the death penalty in all cases as a violation of
the most fundamental human right: the right to life.' Amnesty said it had
asked Singapore to make public 'comprehensive information about the
state's use of the death penalty' but the government had yet to provide
annual statistics from 1993 to the present.
The rights watchdog said a Ghanian man, Chijioke Stephen Obioha, 20, was
sentenced in December to hang for trafficking of cannabis and his alleged
accomplice, a Zambian woman, was feared to be given the death penalty as
well.
The death penalty is mandatory for trafficking more than 15 grams (half an
ounce) of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine and 500 grams of cannabis.
Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs did not immediately reply to AFP on
its response to the latest criticism, which followed last week's hanging
of a gangster for the gunning down of a nightclub owner.
Amnesty said Singapore, with a population of more than four million, has
one of the highest per capita execution rates in the world. Singapore
executed 420 people between 1991 and 2004, Amnesty said.
The Singapore government maintains capital punishment is important in
keeping crime down and a strong deterrent to organised crime gangs.
Singapore is 1 of 9 states in the Asia Pacific region that still have the
death penalty, Amnesty said.
(source: Straits Times)
