Shadi Sadr, lawyer, women’s rights activist and a key member of the campaign against stoning in Iran spoke with Rooz about the official proclamation by the country’s judiciary to end the practice of stoning of women. Read on for the details.
Rooz (R): How serious is the proclamation by Iran’s judiciary that it has stopped the implementation of stoning? Is this merely an administrative decision or a consensus that state authorities have reached in the sense that they want to announce this procedurally and then legally end the practice altogether?
Shadi Sadr (SS): Around the world, the death penalty and physical torture were initially stopped in judicial practices, and then banned by laws. If we wanted to take an optimistic view, we would say that the same has happened about stoning where we now see a judicial procedure changing which would be followed by legal limitations. Still, I do not know how serious this decision of the judiciary is. The issue is that so long as this type of punishment exists in law, judges are obliged to implement it. In other words, if judges conclude that a case meets the criteria for stoning, they will issue orders for it.
Certainly the very fact that something like this is publicly announced is a positive event. One must of course be careful not to put too much faith into it. When I read the responses to Mr. Jamshidi’s news conference in which he announced this issue, in the domestic and international media, I was both surprised and at the same time felt angry.
R: Why?
SS: Because I think they are interpreting remarks that are primarily diplomatic in nature to be of legal and operational meaning. From a legal perspective, so long as there is no change in the laws, one cannot be optimistic that through an administrative decision at the top, which indicates only the views and will of parts of the judiciary and not all of it, these things will stop being practiced. By law, judges are not required to follow the views of ayatollah Shahrudi (the head of Iran’s judiciary) or even implement his circulars. This is because no one can issue order anything that is above or and such orders contradict the law. Another issue that no foreign media reported even though it did take place at the conference is that a question was specifically asked whether this announcement would lead to a change in the Islamic Penal code that is currently in the Majlis. Mr. Jamshidi very categorically said no, and that stoning is not something that will be removed.
R: It appears that parts of the judiciary are trying to make some of the laws compatible with the real world outside us, while another part tries to satisfy the religious-conservative groups that advocate such punishment through the law. What is the source of this contradiction?
SS: I believe there is a pragmatic group in the judiciary. What plays a role in this are the pressures from inside and outside the country, to which this groups is sensitive. The other source are the pressures from the fundamentalists, inside or outside the regime, who enjoys political and religious power. This is why that ever after Mr. Jamshidi announced that stoning would not be removed from the penal code, someone like Ali Motahari, a Majlis representative, expresses his concern about the possibility of suspension of stoning at a speech in the Majlis.
R: How effective have the activities of the ‘campaign for laws without stoning’ to which you are central, been in educating the public and society, including officials?
SS: From the moment we embarked on this path, our goal has been to end this practice. And we came just one step short of it. As far as I know, when the original draft of the new Islamic penal code was prepared in Qom, stoning was not part of it. It was added on to it later. Obviously we have not yet achieved our goal and so our struggle continues. Buy we have also have made progress in our work. For example, we succeeded in saving the lives of a number of people who had been sentenced to death by stoning. Some even were released from prison altogether. Another issue is that when we began this campaign, even discussing stoning was a taboo in the country’s media. The press was not willing to publish anything about it. Now of course we see that they are more open to the subject and we can say and write things about it. It has turned into a subject that society can actually talk about. I view this as a major accomplishment.
