Death by Stoning

Hajiyeh Esmaelvand was stoned to death for committing adultery in Iran on December 2004.

The International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) had reported that in the beginning of February 2003, the Iranian Minister of Justice Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahrudi had promised the EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Chris Patten, to abolish stoning as a form of punishment no matter what the crime committed. In a similar case, Shahnaz, another 35-year old Iranian woman, was sentenced to death by stoning on 4 August 2003 for "adultery", in accordance with Article 83 of the Iranian Penal Code. International protests were only able to prevent her death by stoning sentence but her life could not be saved. Shahnaz was decapitated instead.

These are but a few cases which have been prominent in the media. Such cases shake us to our very core but once you move up to the far middle-east, they increase in number. Cases of stoning are mostly reported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

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