Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43 year old Iranian woman, mother of two children, was convicted in May 2006 because she had an “illicit relationship” with two men and received 99 lashes as her punishment. Despite this sentence, she has now been convicted of “adultery” and sentenced to death by stoning.

She is currently being held on death row in Tabriz Prison, north-west Iran, and faces imminent execution; regardless the Iran’s High Council for Human Rights said that her case would be reviewed.

A petition is now running online to call on the Iranian authorities to elucidate her current legal status, and to require that the authorities ratify legislation that bans stoning as a legal punishment, and eliminates other forms of the death penalty for “adultery” such as fogging or imprisonment.

The international community is getting united around the case of Sakineh - a terrified woman who does not even speak the language of her accusers – and confessed a crime under torture to a TV camera. Amnesty International considered that statements made in such televised exchanges should have no influence on Iran's legal system, or the call to review her case: “It appears that Iran’s authorities have orchestrated this “confession”, following the call for a judicial review and now appear to be inventing new charges of murdering her husband,” alleged Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director at Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

Ramos Horta, nobel Prize winner, was one of the international personalities appealing for this case review: “It is time to leave stoning as a form of capital punishment behind us as a race, to relegate it to the same place we have put stringing heretics on racks - in a chapter of our past that we are not proud of”.

Sign this petition to release Sakineh.