Free Republic

Kabul (AFP) – Three women and 11 men were flogged Wednesday on the orders of an Afghan court after they were found guilty of theft and "moral crimes", a provincial official said. The lashings are the first to be confirmed since the Taliban's supreme leader ordered judges this month to fully enforce Islamic law, or sharia, saying corporal punishment was obligatory for certain crimes. Qazi Rafiullah Samim, head of information and culture for Logar province, told AFP the lashings were not administered publicly. "Fourteen people were given discretionary punishment, of which 11 were men and three were women," he said,...

Shirin Ebadi, a former Iranian judge who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 but who now lives in the UK, believes that if she returned to Tehran “Iranian people would welcome me, but the intelligence services would come to arrest me with handcuffs.” Asked by EUobserver if Iran would hang her, she said: “I don’t know.” Her statement, in Brussels last Thursday (13 March), shows how little she thinks Iran has changed despite the election of President Hassan Rohani, a moderate, and despite the warming up in EU-Iran ties. […] According to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, an Iranian NGO,...

On July 9, 1999, six days of student-led uprising shook the foundations of Iran’s ruling fundamentalist regime. If not suppressed, the uprising, which quickly spread to nearly two-dozen other cities, had the potential of sweeping the theocracy from power. With the blessing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mohammad Khatami, uniformed and plain-clothes security forces brutally cracked down on students and the thousands of other Iranians who had joined them. Several thousands were arrested and hundreds killed or wounded. The Economist magazine billed it as “Iran’s Second Revolution.” Others described it as a new page in the history of...