Women demonstrate on August 11, 2010 in front of the Embassy of Iran in Caracas, Venezuela, against stoning.JUAN BARRETO/AFP / Getty Images
The televised confession of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman facing death by stoning for adultery, is a sign that the Islamic regime feels the pressure being exerted by the international community, and internally, too. All the more reason to keep pressing Iran, and, more broadly, any country that still tolerates the barbaric practice of stoning.
The world needs to make it clear that any country seeking to benefit from being a part of the international community needs to stay clear of this medieval and discriminatory form of punishment.
Apart from Iran, stoning is reportedly on the law books in parts of other countries that follow strict Islamic law, including Yemen, Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates. Iran, in many ways a modern, sophisticated country, should be a primary focus of efforts to rid the world of this medieval punishment.
Inextricable from the medievalism is the sex discrimination: women have no right to divorce under sharia law in Iran; men do. Women's testimony is worth half what men's is. The judges are male. Hence stoning for adultery, while it applies to men, is more likely to be used on women. At least seven other women and three men also face stoning in Iran.
Iran now says Ms. Ashtiani was an accessory to the murder of her husband, a crime it says it didn't wish to reveal earlier, when she was convicted of adultery, because the details were too horrifying. Her lawyer has fled the country, and Ms. Ashtiani has apparently denounced him as having not been up to the job of defending her. "It's textbook Islamic Republic," says Payam Akhavan, a law professor at Montreal's McGill University. The televised confession wrung from Ms. Ashtiani is part of a carefully scripted attempt at damage control, to divert attention from the central issue: the stoning itself.
The 43-year-old Ms. Ashtiani, who was pronounced guilty of adultery by just three of five judges, all of whom cited their own "knowledge" rather than actual evidence, is to be buried in a dirt pit to just above her breast line (men are buried to their waists) for the stoning, which results in a slow, tortured death. Her case cries out for a fair and impartial review, of a kind that seems impossible in today's Iran.
There should an inventory of the countries that still practice or tolerate stoning, and international pressure should be brought to bear on those countries. As the civilized world said enough to slavery (which is not yet totally eradicated), so should it say enough to death by stoning.