At times during the past year it has seemed invidious for The Times to focus so intently on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani when so many other Iranians are victims of egregious human rights violations.
Why have we not written more about the hundreds of political activists locked up, beaten and tortured after President Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election in 2009? Or about Nasrin Sotoudeh and the dozen other courageous human rights lawyers who have been imprisoned for defending them? Or about Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the young American hikers who have spent two years in Evin prison without a shred of evidence to support the espionage charges against them?
The answer is that none of those cases, shocking though they are, exposes the barbarity of a regime that professes to champion the oppressed and Islamic values as powerfully as Ms Ashtiani’s. None shows so clearly the regime’s contempt for basic human rights and international legal conventions.
An uneducated woman, she has been denied a fair trial and discriminated against because of her sex. Her lawyers have been exiled or imprisoned. Her children have been silenced and one of them jailed for defending her. She has been forced to make televised “confessions” to justify her own execution. For almost six years she has gone to sleep each night not knowing if she will be woken before dawn and either hanged or stoned to death.
She has endured much of this in solitary confinement. Her suffering can scarcely be imagined.
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The UN recently appointed a special rapporteur to investigate Iran’s human rights record. The regime will almost certainly deny him entry, as it has to any international rapporteur in recent years. It is not hard to understand why.