One year on: Iran’s shame over Ashtiani

It described how, if the sentence were not commuted, Ms Ashtiani, 43, would be taken from her prison cell in the northwestern city of Tabriz before dawn one morning, wrapped in a shroud and buried up to her chest in a hole. A ring of men would then pelt her with stones large enough to cause severe injury, but not so big that they killed her outright. The stoning would continue until she died.

Ms Ashtiani is far from the only victim of Iran’s dire human rights record, and she is not a saint. Mohammed Mostafaei, her first lawyer, says that she probably did help her alleged partner to kill her husband, who was a drug addict, repeatedly beat her and sought to sell her to friends for sex. But it was also apparent that she had been denied a fair trial by a system heavily weighted against women, and that she faced execution while her alleged partner walked free because her children had exercised their right under Islamic law to forgive him.

Her story struck a chord like few others. Scores of politicians, artists and luminaries, British and foreign, signed an open letter in The Times expressing horror and dismay at her plight. Governments across the West condemned her sentence.

She became a cause célèbre for human rights organisations, bloggers and media outlets around the world. Tens of thousands of people signed online petitions and held Ms Ashtiani’s picture aloft in demonstrations outside Iranian embassies.

David Cameron called her sentence “completely inhuman and despicable”. Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister at the time, offered to fly to Tehran to plead her case. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian President who was one of the few world leaders on good terms with the regime, offered Ms Ashtiani asylum — which Tehran brusquely rejected.

The campaign bore immediate fruit. The Iranian Embassy in London issued a statement saying that Ms Ashtiani would not be stoned. However, the regime left open the possibility that she could be hanged instead and, one year on, Ms Ashtiani still languishes in prison knowing that she could be executed at any moment. Officially, her case is under review by the Iranian Supreme Court, but her supporters believe that this is a charade.

Reluctant to capitulate to Western pressure, the regime has pursued a two-pronged strategy. It has sought to justify Ms Ashtiani’s execution by portraying her as a cold-blooded murderer, and to suppress all sources of information about her case.

Ms Ashtiani has been put on state television to “confess” four times and, on one of those occasions, she was taken to her home to re-enact her husband’s killing. Her lawyers were not present for any of those “confessions”. Her supporters have no doubt that they were coerced. At the same time Mr Mostafaei, her Tehran lawyer, was forced to flee after giving repeated interviews about his client to Western journalists. As he made his way overland to Turkey, the regime imprisoned his wife. She was held in solitary confinement for two weeks and released only when her husband reached the safety of Norway. “I lost my usefulness,” she explained.

Javid Houtan Kian, 33, who succeeded Mr Mostafaei as Ms Ashtiani’s lawyer, suffered an even worse fate.

First, security agents ransacked his home and office in Tabriz, taking away his computer and files relating to the case. Then, last October, he was locked up in the same prison as his client.

In a letter smuggled out in March he said that he had been put in a ward for the insane and HIV-infected drug users and had suffered months of torture. He had had his testicles and feet burnt with cigarettes, lost 12 teeth in beatings and had been dragged into the prison yard on freezing nights and soaked with a firehose. In May Mr Kian was reportedly sentenced to 11 years for undermining national security and spreading propaganda. It is unclear whether Ms Ashtiani has been allocated another lawyer.

Ms Ashtiani’s son, Sajad Ghaderzadeh, 23, has also been silenced. He has received threats and warnings and last October he was arrested with Mr Kian after giving an interview to two German journalists. He was released this year but no longer speaks to Western journalists and even participated last December in his mother’s re-enactment of her husband’s murder.

The Times has made mistakes. It published a photograph of a woman without a headscarf whom it wrongly named as Ms Ashtiani. Unconfirmed reports suggested that she was lashed for that “offence”, even though prison authorities must have known that the woman in the picture was not her.

Along with other media outlets, The Times also reported her apparent release last December when, in fact, she was merely being taken for the re-enactment. The regime gloated, but the mistakes were a direct consequence of its suppression of all independent sources of information.

One year on, Ms Ashtiani remains in prison, but the regime has not dared to defy the world by executing her and there have been no reports of other deaths by stoning.

Senior officials have repeatedly denounced the campaign to save her as a Western plot to undermine Iran.

Defecting Iranian diplomats have asserted that it has kept Ms Ashtiani alive. Her case also helped to thwart Iran’s bid for a seat on the new UN Human Rights Council.

In April a journalist from The Times, given a rare visa to Iran, delivered a letter from James Harding, the Editor, to President Ahmadinejad requesting an interview about Ms Ashtiani’s case. It also requested access to the relevant documents and judicial authorities so that the question of her guilt or innocence could finally be resolved.

There has been no reply.