Gracen Intelligence Commentary:
In a country that routinely exonerates murderers who claim their religion or their honor has been offended — that frees perpetrators of crimes against women on trumped-up charges of adultery — that turns a blind eye to abuses of the Baha'i, Jews, Christians and all others of non-Muslim faith, this is an encouraging, if extremely odd, turn of events. Ebadi, who is anti-death penalty under normal circumstances, has either changed position, or there is something about this family of such importance that the general Iranian population is being warned not to mess with their property. It is on behalf of the woman's family — not the woman's personhood — that this sentence was handed down and carried out. The victim is still, on balance, property, despite being dead. At the same time, there's perhaps another reason: if the culture of Iran invokes the death penalty by stoning on grounds of unproved adultery, extra-judicial (and then absolved) murders of non-Muslims, and so-called "honor" killings based on the bruised psychosexual pride of a man who thinks he owns a woman, we can only applaud this execution on the grounds of equal protection under the law. Until Iran rids itself of its egregious abuses of human rights, particular those of the most vulnerable — the women, the children, the Baha'i and other non-Muslims — it can at least apply equally laws against the taking of human life. It is the position of Gracen Intelligence that it opposes the death penalty, but only under the condition that a nation opposes the death penalty for all — not selectively applying it to women and minorities in judicial and extrajudicial fashion, and then writing laws and installing judges that give a privileged sector of the society (in this case the Mullahs and Muslim men) the right to kill out of ego or bigotry and then go free. Given Ebadi's record on this issue, our supposition is that this may be the point that she, as a lawyer and judge, is actually making. — Morgaan Sinclair for Gracen Intelligence
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Source: http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.425347667&par=0
Tehran, 13 June (AKI) - The news that a young man has been executed in Tehran for raping and killing a woman has been met with surprise and criticism by progressive Iranians not because of the sentence - Iran ranks second after China for the number of executions carried out - but because the attorney who reportedly demanded capital punishment on behalf of the victim's family is Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, an anti-death penalty campaigner. Mohammed Safar was hanged a few days ago at Tehran's Evin prison.
Iranian blogs, mostly those of women's rights activists, have harshly condemned Ebadi.
"Someone like her who is a campaigner for peace and justice cannot support the request for the death penalty asked by the family's victim," wrote on her blog women's rights activist Assieh Amini.
Ebadi's office in Tehran contacted by Adnkronos International (AKI) refused to comment the reports.
A graduate of Tehran University, Shirin Ebadi, 60, was the first female judge in her country, serving as president of the Tehran city court, from 1975.
However, after the 1979 Islamic revolution she was forced to resign when it was decided that women were not suitable for such posts.
Ebadi then established a law practice, taking on politically sensitive cases many Iranian lawyers were afraid to touch.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts to stop among other things political imprisonment, gender discrimination and the death penalty in Iran.
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3 comments:
Hopefully the Iranian government will start imprisoning men who gang-rape women of rival tribes as punishment for offenses committed by men. The Iranian government systematically refuses to deal with these gangs -- and the imams who send them.
Nothing is going to happen in Iran until the Iranian Supreme Council is taken out of complete control of the politics there -- and the Monkey with him. You have the whole flow of Iranian society in opposition to oppressive Islamism of the society, and there's nothing that can be done. On the day we hear about Ebadi's defense of a rape victim's family (OK, it's too late to defend the victim), we hear a bout possible charges against 700 women protestors in Iran and more enriched uranium. Somehow I just don't feel that ch eered.
You have to give these women credit for slogging on in the face of clearly insurmountable odds. The student revolt a couple of years ago was stopped by the flaying and burning deaths of 35 Tehran University students. Bloggers arrested and disappear, without a hint of what happens to them. I think it will take a revolution and that freedom will be bought only at the sacrifice of many, many young lives. But perhaps with such a young population there is some political hope. Yet when I drift into that kind of optimism I remember that remember that all but two of Khatami's 1,400 reforms were simply vetoed by the ISC and that nothing, absolutely nothing, resulted in all that effort. I confess to being depressed about this situation.
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