Kabul: Afghanistan’s government has backed away from a proposal to reintroduce public stoning as a punishment for adultery after the leak of a draft law stirred a storm of international condemnation.
President Hamid Karzai said in an interview that the penalty, which became a symbol of Taliban brutality when the group were in power, would not be coming back.
“It is not correct. The minister of justice has rejected it,” he told Radio Free Europe, days after British Minister Justine Greening urged him to prevent the penalty from becoming law.
Afghanistan’s penal code dates back over three decades. The government is drawing up a new one to unify fragmented rules and cover crimes missed out when the last version was written, such as money laundering, and offences that did not exist at the time, such as Internet crimes.
After several days of silence in the face of growing international outcry, the Justice Ministry said although stoning had been proposed, it would not appear in the new legislation because there was “no need to regulate the issue”.
The penal code encompasses Shariah law, but some controversial aspects of traditional punishments such as stoning have never been put on the books in Afghanistan.
“The legality of the crime and punishment is fully addressed and there is no need to regulate the issue in the new code. So, the ministry does not intend to regulate it in the new draft code,” it said.
Rights groups who first highlighted the draft law warned that although the government’s quashing of the proposal was good news, its emergence in the first place was a sign of how fragile gains in human rights over the last decade had been, particularly for women. “It’s a huge relief that the government appears eager to disown this proposal, but this is not an aberration that appeared out of the blue,” said Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch. The Guardian
