There is a more recent update after this original story.
Sokian was 15 when she was first married. During that time, her husband beat and abused her and her pleas fell on deaf ears. Sokian took matter into her own hands and now faces execution after she gave birth to a stillborn baby while in prison.
Horrifying story, nobody deserves this. This is NOT a religion of peace!
RT has the full story:
An Iranian woman is due to be executed for murdering her husband after she gave birth to a stillborn baby while in prison. Her death sentence was delayed due to her pregnancy, as per Iranian law.Zeinab Sokian, who was sentenced to death in 2012, aged only 17, for reportedly killing her husband in northern Iran, became pregnant through a relationship with another prisoner.
Iranian law does not allow for pregnant women to be executed, so her life was temporarily spared. After she gave birth to a stillborn baby at the end of September, however, authorities gave the go-ahead for her to be executed within weeks.
Sokian was 15 when she was first married. During her trial, she alleged that her husband constantly beat and abused her. Her claims were dismissed by the court, according to Human Rights Watch. Under Iranian Civil Code, girls can be married at 13 and boys at 15. Those who marry at such a young age face greater risk of physical and sexual abuse than those who wed at 18, the organization added.
Iran is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which outlaws the death penalty for those aged under 18 when they commit a capital offense, but despite this, the Islamic Republic has already executed one minor in 2016.
An additional 49 prisoners who were children at the time of committing an offense are also currently on death row.
UPDATE from Amnesty.org.uk
Zeinab Sekaanvand Lokran came from a poor, conservative Iranian-Kurdish family, and ran away from home at 15 to marry Hossein Sarmadi in the hope for a better life.
Soon after the wedding, Hossein started beating Zeinab – she asked for a divorce, but he refused. She told police, but they ignored her. She ran away, but her family disowned her.
She was 17 when her husband died. Zeinab was arrested and “confessed” that she killed her husband. She was then held at the police station for 20 days and repeatedly tortured by police officers.
After an unfair trial, in which she was denied access to a lawyer during her entire pre-trial detention, Zeinab was sentenced to death by hanging.
In 2015, Zeinab married a fellow prisoner in Oroumieh Central Prison and became pregnant. Her execution was delayed while Zeinab was expecting.
But doctors said her baby died in her womb two due to shock, around the same time her cell mate and friend was executed on 28 September 2018.
She returned from hospital to the prison the very next day and was hanged on 2 October.
We won’t stop fighting for justice
Nearly 90,000 of you signed our petition urging the Iranian authorities to halt Zeinab’s execution and throw out her death sentence.
Unfortunately, Zeinab’s story is not an isolated case in Iran. We have recorded at least 74 executions of juvenile offenders between 2005 and 2016 in Iran. Zeinab is the fifth to be executed in 2018 so far.
Zeinab’s execution should never have happened and it’s vital that we don’t give up fighting for people so it doesn’t happen again. The death penalty is never the answer.
Background on Zeinab’s case
Zeinab only met her state-appointed lawyer for the first time at her final trial session. It was then that she retracted confessions made when she’d had no access to a lawyer.
She told the court that her husband’s brother, who she said had raped her several times, was responsible for the murder and had coerced her into confessing, promising he would pardon her (under Islamic law, murder victims’ relatives have the power to pardon the offender and accept financial compensation instead).
This statement was ignored by the court, which instead relied heavily on her old “confessions” to reach its verdict.
A child at the time of the crime
Zainab was just 17 at the time of the crime she was accused of. The courts completely failed to apply juvenile sentencing from Iran’s Islamic penal code in her case.
They also failed to tell her that she could submit an application for retrial. Iran’s penal code falls woefully short of what’s required for juvenile offenders under international human rights law, and even the limited safeguards that do exist are not adhered to by the authorities.
The use of the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18 is also completely prohibited under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran has signed up to.
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