last week, as predicted by one human rights group, but the word that she might be hanged renewed interest in her case that had been flagging in recent weeks.
The number of signers on an online petition calling for her to be freed rose almost 80 times in the week after the hanging report as compared to the week before.
That surge effectively gave word to the regime that while international attention to the case flagged when weeks passed with no new developments, the latent public interest remains and flared anew once there was news. That suggests that the Islamic Republic will face a huge public uproar around the world if it does actually execute Ashtiani.
Regime officials have put Ashtiani’s stoning sentence for adultery aside but said that she was liable to be hanged for a murder conviction. It appeared the regime reasoned a hanging would not draw as much animosity as a stoning. But her lawyer said the charges of participating in her husband’s murder were dropped years ago and legally she only faced execution by stoning for adultery.
Signatures on a petition calling for Ashtiani to be set free have been collected for some months at the website www.freesakineh.org.
As of Tuesday, there were 427,465 signers, up by more than 76,000 from a week earlier, an average of almost 11,000 signatures a day. Here are the daily averages over the last 14 weeks, starting with this past week:
10,900
140
110
200
175
275
365
1,000
3,800
11,400
3,700
2,200
3,600
2,000
The word that Ashtiani could be hanged as early as November 3 was given to the media November 2 by Mina Ahadi, who runs a campaign against stoning from her base in Germany.
She said that her sources in Iran told her that Ashtiani’s name was on a list of executions that had been approved by Iran’s Supreme Court, which must review all death sentences issued by lower courts.
Ahadi said Ashtiani could still be executed at any time since her name is on that list.
The Tuesday announcement from Ahadi elicited not just the flood of signatures on the online petition, but also vocal opposition from Western governments.
The European Union issued a statement saying that its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, “demands that Iran halt the execution and convert her sentence.”
The five Nordic countries issued a joint statement saying the execution of Ashtiani was “clearly unacceptable.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Iran’s leaders have failed once again to protect the fundamental rights of their own citizens, particularly women.”
The wife of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Laureen Harper, sent an open letter to President Ahmadi-nejad calling Ashtiani’s case “an affront to any sense of moral and human decency.”
In Brazil, President-elect Dilma Rousseff, who doesn’t take office until January and isn’t expected to make any foreign policy statements until then, nonetheless spoke out, calling the sentence “barbaric.”
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast vented his spleen at the international outpouring. “They [Western nations] have become so shameless that they have turned the case of Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, who has committed crimes and treason, into a human rights case against our nation. It has become a symbol of women’s freedom in Western nations and with impudence they want to free her. Thus, they are trying to use this ordinary case as a pressure lever against our nation.”
His comments portrayed the reaction of Western officials as if they had chosen the Ashtiani case for attention, rather than were just reacting to an immense public uproar that has arisen largely through women’s organizations in dozens of countries.
Within Iran, there is a divide between those officials who want to set the execution aside, seeing it as very dangerous for Iran’s standing in the world, and those who refuse to give in to foreign pressure, demanding that Ashtiani be executed chiefly to spite the rest of the world.