The Story of Ateqeh Rajabi (also known as Atefeh Sahaleh Rajabi)

How is it that a 16 year old girl would be hanged in public -- for any reason?

On August 15 , 2004, in the northern Iranian province of Mazandaran, that’s just what happened, when an adolescent girl named Ateqeh Rajabi was hanged in the city centre of Neka, for “acts incompatible with chastity,” in accordance with the form of Shari’ a, or Islamic-based law, practiced by her country. According to a February 28, 2005 Report on Human Rights Practice in Iran by the U.S. Department of State says that, “Rajabi was not believed to be mentally competent; she had no access to a lawyer. Her sentence was reviewed and upheld by the Supreme Court.” According to reports by the Iran Press Service, the BBC, Amnesty International and other news reporting services, although the Mazandaran Judiciary reported her age as 22, Ateqeh’s national identification card, birth certificate and death certificate each listed her age as 16.

Ateqeh had reportedly become involved with a man more than twice her age, had been seen holding hands with him, and had reported that he had raped her. The man in this case was reportedly given 100 lashes and released. According to an article by Safa Haeri in the online Iran Press Service, “informed sources revealed that Ms. Ateqeh was sentenced to death by the judge, a cleric, because during the ‘trial,’ she expressed outrage at the misogyny and injustice in the Islamic Republic and its Islam-based judicial system.” According to a report in the online news service, Peyke Iran, “the animosity and anger of (judge) Haji Reza was so strong that he personally put the rope around the girl’s delicate neck and personally gave the signal to the crane operator, by raising his hand, to begin pulling the rope.”

This disturbing story begs the question “can a nation whose laws are based on the mandates of a particular religion, protect human rights at the same time, inclusive of all social minorities?” And, can religious legal interpretation, necessitated by adherence to Shari’a, be consistent enough across scholars to form clear-cut guidelines with predictable, government sanctioned and protected consequences? There is apparently one country attempting to reconcile their reliance on Shari’a with international human rights covenants (see Clark B. Lombardi, University of Washington School of Law, and Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, article, “Do Constitutions Requiring Adherence to Shari’a Threaten Human Rights? How Egypt’s Constitutional Court Reconciles Islamic Law with the Liberal Rule of Law.”) But in places where one religion’s power is absolute, it would appear that the least empowered members of a society, e.g., religious minorities, women and children (an August 23, 2004, Public Statement by Amnesty International states that “the execution of Ateqeh Rajabi is the tenth execution of a child offender in Iran recorded by Amnesty International since 1990.”) suffer the most treacherous consequences, and;

A society is only as protected as its smallest minority.