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	Activists push for global ban on stoning by Thomson Reuters Foundation   29 Sep 2013   Two months ago, a young mother-of-two was stoned to death by her relatives on the order of a tribal court in Pakistan. Her crime: possession of a mobile phone.   Arifa Bibi’s uncle, cousins and others hurled stones and bricks at her until she died, according to media reports. She was buried in a desert far from her village. It’s unlikely anyone was arrested.   But her case is not unique. Stoning is legal or practised in at least 15 countries or regions. And campaigners fear this barbaric form of execution may be on the rise, particularly in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.   Women’s rights activists have launched an international campaign for a ban on stoning, which is mostly inflicted on women accused of adultery.   They are using Twitter and other social media to put pressure on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to denounce the practice.   “Stoning is a cruel and hideous punishment – it is a form of torturing someone to death,” said Naureen Shameem of international rights group Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML).   “It is one of the most brutal forms of violence perpetrated against women in order to control and punish their sexuality and basic freedoms.”   She said activists will also push the United Nations to adopt a resolution on stoning, similar to the one passed last year on eradicating female genital mutilation (FGM) – another form of violence against women often justified on religious and cultural grounds.   Stoning is not legal in most Muslim countries and there is no mention of it in the Koran. But supporters argue that it is legitimised by the Hadith – the acts and sayings of the Prophet Mohammad.   Stoning is set out as a specific punishment for adultery under several interpretations of sharia or Islamic law. In some instances, even a woman saying she has been raped can be considered an admission to the crime of “zina” – or sex outside marriage.   In one case cited by Shameem, a 13-year-old Somali girl, Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, was buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men in front of 1000 people at a stadium in Kismayu in 2008.   Her father told Amnesty International she had been raped by three men but was accused of adultery when she tried to report the rape to the al Shabaab militia in control of the city.   EXTRAJUDICIAL TERROR   Iran has the world’s highest rate of execution by stoning. No one knows how many people have been stoned but at least 11 people are in prison under sentence of stoning, according to Iranian human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr.   Sadr, who has represented five people sentenced to stoning, said Iran carried out stonings in secret in prisons, the desert or very early in the morning in cemeteries.   “Pressure from outside Iran always helps. The Islamic Republic always pretends that they don’t care about their reputation, but the fact is they do care a lot,” added Sadr, who now lives in exile in Britain.   Stoning is also a legal punishment for adultery in Mauritania, a third of Nigeria’s 36 states, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.   In some countries like Mauritania and Qatar, stoning has never been used although it remains legal. However, there are other countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where stoning is not legal but tribal leaders, militants and others carry it out extrajudicially.   “In Afghanistan, warlords are manipulating religion to really terrorise the population for their own political ends. And stoning is one way of doing that,” said Shameem, a human rights lawyer who is co-ordinating the Stop Stoning Women campaign.   Last year, a 21-year-old girl, Najiba, was stoned in front of more than 100 cheering men after warlords in Afghanistan’s Parwan province accused her of “moral crimes”. One of the men filmed the stoning, which can be seen on the internet.   Shameem said Najiba’s case highlighted the level of impunity that exists.   DISCRIMINATION   Campaigners say women are more likely to be convicted of adultery than men because discriminatory laws and customs penalise women more than men for sexual relations outside marriage.   If a man is unhappy with his wife he can – depending on the country – divorce, take other wives or marry another woman temporarily. A woman has few options. She can only divorce in certain circumstances and risks losing custody of her children.   Men accused of adultery are also more likely to have the means to hire lawyers and their greater physical freedom makes it easier for them to flee in situations where they risk extrajudicial stoning.   Activists say trials are often unfair. Convictions are frequently based on confessions made under duress.   As adultery is difficult to prove, judges in Iran can also convict on the basis of their gut feeling rather than evidence.   Even the manner of stoning is loaded against women. People sentenced to stoning in Iran are partially buried. If they can escape they are spared. But women are customarily buried up to their chests while men are only buried up to their waists.   Stoning contravenes a host of U.N. treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states no one should be subjected to torture, or cruel or inhuman punishment.   The treaty, which Iran and Pakistan have signed, also only allows countries to execute people for “the most serious crimes”.   Many prominent Muslim clerics have spoken in support of a ban on stoning, deeming it un-Islamic and antithetical to the Koran, with its emphasis on repentance and compassion.   Shameem said stoning mostly happened in conflict or post-conflict areas where politicians, warlords and militants exploit people’s religious beliefs as they jockey for power.   Mali saw its first case last year after Islamist militants took control of the north of the country.   It is not clear why the tribal court in Bibi’s case should have justified stoning as a punishment for having a mobile phone.   But Shameem said stoning and the threat of stoning was being used “to control women, constrain their freedoms, and police their sexuality”.   The threat of stoning has even been used to control women in Tunisia – a relatively liberal country with no history of stoning.   This year, the head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Tunisia called for a teenage activist to be stoned to death for posting nude protest images of herself online.   Campaigners plan to present a petition to U.N. chief Ban and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on November 25 – International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.   The online petition, calls on Ban to publically denounce stoning as “one of the most brutal forms of violence against women”.   Shameen said the second stage of the campaign would be to work on a U.N. resolution abolishing stoning.   “Many of our network in the Violence is not our Culture campaign were very involved in developing the resolution against FGM. It’s an inspiration and a model from which we are working,” she added. Visit the related web page
	China"s stolen children: parents battle police indifference by Humanity United & agencies   Tens of thousands of children are snatched and sold into slavery every year, but parents say they get little help with their search.   "Back then, they just told me to keep looking," said Yuan Cheng, punctuating the sentence with a lengthy drag on his cigarette. Sitting in his mud-floored home in Hebei province, a few hours north of Beijing, the farmer is talking about the lack of interest from the police when his 15-year-old son, Xueyu, went missing from a construction site in Zhengzhou in 2007.   Six years on, Yuan says the police have finally admitted to him that there was a string of child abductions in the area around the time his son disappeared. But when he went to them, two days after Xueyu went missing, the police said: "Keep looking on your own and we"ll talk about it again in a couple of days."   Tens of thousands of children are kidnapped in China each year for sale into adoption, street life, forced labour and prostitution.   The horror faced by parents whose children are stolen is highlighted in Chinese and international media whenever there is a particularly disturbing case. Recently police arrested a hospital doctor in Shaanxi province over her alleged role in stealing newborn babies and selling them. The police investigation managed to track down some of the missing babies and reunite them with their parents.   But that is an unusually happy ending in a country where parents say they are battling police indifference as well as traffickers in the hunt to find missing children.   In 2011, Chinese police rescued 8,660 abducted children, but it is likely that at least double that number were kidnapped. China does not release official figures relating to child trafficking, so estimates are based on the numbers of missing-child reports posted by parents online and of children reported rescued each year.   Estimates range from 10,000 kidnapped per year to as high as 70,000. Most parents who lose children stand very little chance of seeing them again.   At the national level, China takes child abduction very seriously. It has a national anti-kidnapping taskforce that investigates and infiltrates trafficking rings, and there are frequent anti-kidnapping campaigns that encourage citizens to report anything suspicious. But at local level, where the first, crucial reports will be made when a child goes missing, parents say the police just don"t seem to care.   "The evening we reported it they went out and patrolled a bit, after that we never saw them looking [for her] again," said Zhu Cuifang, whose 12-year-old daughter, Lei Xiaoxia, went missing in 2011. The police also failed to check surveillance tapes at her school or interview any of her classmates.   Critics say that the slow reaction of local police plays into the hands of the traffickers. The involvement of organised rings means a kidnapped child could be taken thousands of miles and passed between numerous handlers over the first couple of days.   Pi Yijun, a professor at the Institute for Criminal Justice at the China University of Political Science and Law, says: "An important problem is that when a child is lost, the parents go and talk to the police, and the police need to judge whether the kid has got lost or has been kidnapped.   "At present, in Chinese law, they need to be missing for 24 hours to be listed as a missing person or as kidnapped, but that 24 hours is also the most crucial time – so there is a major conflict there. How can you judge quickly whether the child has got lost or is being hidden as a prank or really has been kidnapped? That"s a serious problem."   Often, it is a problem that is never fully resolved. In rural areas and the outskirts of cities where migrant workers live, children aren"t too difficult to acquire, adds Pi.   China"s one child policy has created an environment where finding a buyer for a boy is rarely difficult; there are always parents somewhere who want a son to support them in their old age but don"t want to pay the fines for additional children just to end up with more daughters.   Child kidnapping is so prevalent in China that even when a stolen child tells people what has happened, sometimes nothing is done.   Wang Qingshun was kidnapped and sold to "adoptive" parents in the 1980s. The couple who bought him already had two daughters and thought it would be easier to buy a son than keep trying to have one naturally.   While he was growing up, Wang told his neighbours that he had been kidnapped and that the people he lived with were not really his parents. But they didn"t report this to the police until a decade later.   While individual stories of stolen children make the headlines briefly and then fade, parents never stop looking. Many say they are spending thousands of dollars searching, unsupported, for their children, fighting to raise awareness of cases that will never be solved.   In the six years that Yuan Cheng has been searching for his son, he has helped rescue other children who had been kidnapped and sold into forced labour, but he hasn"t found Xueyu yet.   Zhu Cuifang and her husband, Lei Yong, haven"t found Xiaoxia either. Still, they press on, because as Zhu put it, "if we can"t find our daughter, life is meaningless". Visit the related web page
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