A year has passed since a provincial Iranian court decreed that, for the crime of adultery, Sakineh Ashtiani should be buried up to her neck and stoned to death. A year later, mercifully, she is still alive. But in that time she has lived under the ever present threat of a brutal and barbaric death. Her son has been jailed, as has her lawyer, who was also tortured.
Ms Ashtiani, who had already been found not guilty of complicity in the murder of her husband (carried out by his cousin), has seen the charge trumped up once more, as a retrospective justification for her punishment. She has now been in prison for six years. While there, she has been beaten and has suffered lashes. She has been dragged from jail to her own home, to be paraded in front of television cameras and deliver coerced denunciations of everybody from the international press to her own lawyers, and then dragged back again. Periodically, regime spokesmen have thoughtfully suggested that she may not be stoned, only to then hint that she may be executed in another way instead. At least once, she has been told that her execution is imminent, and has prepared a will. All this, for adultery.
For a year, The Times has been leading an international campaign to stop the stoning of Ms Ashtiani. A letter calling for her release and an end to the persecution of her son and lawyer has been signed by public figures including José Manuel Barroso, Robert Redford, Ed Miliband, Robert De Niro, Sir Richard Branson, Bernard Kouchner and Damien Hirst. It is a testament to the commitment of all these signatories that Ms Ashtiani’s story is not already over, but the response of the Iranian regime has been not to stop, but to pause. A woman who has suffered too much suffers still.
In many respects, the Arab Spring has provided useful cover for Tehran. Until it began, the story of people straining against tyranny in the Middle East was one dominated by the Green Revolution protests that followed the rigged presidential election of 2009. A backward regime — dominated by a Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorist who answers only to a sheltered fraternity of ageing religious extremists — had unleashed untrammelled brutality on to the streets to silence a more modern and outward-looking population.
As Arabs across the region have displayed similar yearnings for freedom, however, the Iranian Shia theocracy has sought to reposition itself as the friend of the underdog, seeking to recast the Arab Spring as an ethnic conflict between Sunni and Shia. Certainly it has ethnic dimensions, particularly in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, but any purely sectarian reading of Middle Eastern unrest is a deeply simplistic one.
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The Iranian regime is not blind to international pressure, as the stay of execution has shown. Iran’s nuclear efforts, and its destabilising machinations in the Arab Spring, are symptoms of the regime’s clear aim to emerge as the region’s pre-eminent power. Yet the fact that Ms Ashtiani’s life still hangs in the balance is a powerful reminder that Iran is not the solution for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East, but a glaring example of the problem.
This need not be the case. Iran has the Muslim world’s largest middle class, many of them Western-educated. The Green Revolution highlighted the extent to which many, especially women, are stifled under the regime’s repression, and the country has an inspirational tradition of political opposition, all the more inspirational for the brutality with which it is suppressed.
For six years Sakineh Ashtiani has been a victim of the same brutality. She is not a remarkable woman — but she has achieved global recognition through a process of remarkable injustice. She must be released.