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Letter to U.N. human rights rep on recent stonings
From Sassan Pejhan sassan@Sarnoff.COM
October 30, 1997
The Honorable Maurice D. Copithorne,
UN Special Representative on Human Rights in Iran
MCopithorne@ladner.com
Dear Mr. Copithorne,
I am writing to you to express my outrage at the recent execution of 6 people, by stoning, in Iran. According to Salam newspaper and international news agencies, Kheirollah Javanmard, Ali Mokhtarpour, Parviz Hassanzadeh, Fataneh Danesh, Massumeh Einy and Marziyeh Falah were stoned in public in Khazar Abad, near the Caspian Sea, after a court found them guilty of adultery and prostitution. This follows the stoning of a 20-year old woman, back in August, in the Western town of Bukan, after she was convicted of similar charges. In that incident, reported by Kayhan newspaper, the woman survived after she was mistakenly assumed to be dead and left at a morgue.
I condemn this cruel practice in the strongest possible terms, and consider the punishment of stoning to death, regardless of the charges or circumstances, contrary to all human rights principles.
As you are aware, article 119 of the Law of Hodoud and Qesas, passed by the Majlis, states "In the punishment of stoning to death, the stones should not be too large so that the person dies on being hit by one or two of them; they should not be so small either that they could not be defined as stones." The cruelty in this article, and the other articles of the Hodoud and Qesas law, shocks any concerned human being.
Given your own background in matters of law, I am sure you agree that no matter how you interpret Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) ["No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."], to which Iran is a signatory, there is absolutely no way to argue that stoning people to a slow and painful death does NOT constitute "cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment". Furthermore, I can assure you that such a practice is contrary to any of the cultural and moral values that were taught to me by the Iranian family, school system and society that I was born and bred in. As such, I refute any argument, based on cultural and/or religious relativism, in defense of such an appalling practice, as total nonsense.
Mr. Copithorne, I call on you to exercise all the power invested in you by the United Nations and bring pressure upon the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to unconditionally, and immediately, abandon this and other similarly shameful acts (such as the amputation of limbs of robbers and the lashing of those who do not conform with what the government considers to be proper Islamic attire).
Sincerely,
Sassan Pejhan
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* The Iranian Human Rights Working Group
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