LONDON, Dec 13, (Agencies): Celebrities including Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, and Sting have called on Iran to release a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
In an open letter published Monday, more than 80 actors, artists, musicians, academics and politicians said that “Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has suffered enough.”
Signatories include actor Colin Firth, artist Damien Hirst, Nobel literature laureates Wole Soyinka and V.S. Naipaul, British opposition leader Ed Miliband and former French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner. They say Ashtiani has already spent five years in prison and received 99 lashes.
They called on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to release her along with her son and lawyer, who are also imprisoned.
The letter was published on the front page of The Times of London newspaper.
Ashtiani, 43, was convicted in 2006 of having an “illicit relationship” with two men after the murder of her husband the year before and was sentenced at that time to 99 lashes. She was later convicted of adultery and sentenced to be stoned.
Iran also says she has confessed to complicity in her husband’s murder.
After coming under intense demands from Western politicians and rights groups to free Ashtiani, Iran put her stoning sentence for adultery on hold in July for review by the country’s supreme court.
Stoning was widely imposed in the years following the 1979 Islamic revolution, and even though Iran’s judiciary still regularly hands down such sentences, they are often converted to other punishments. The last known stoning was carried out in 2007.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, the leader of Britain’s Labour party Ed Miliband, American actor Robert De Niro, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka are among the signatories.
Ashtiani’s sentence to be stoned for adultery — the only crime which carries that penalty under Iran’s Islamic sharia law — was suspended earlier this year, but she still faces possible execution by hanging for complicity in the murder of her husband.
The European Union has called the sentence “barbaric,” the Vatican pleaded for clemency and Brazil, which has tried to intervene in Iran’s standoff with the West over its nuclear programme, offered Ashtiani asylum.
While Iranian officials say Ashtiani’s case is purely a matter for the judiciary, it has become an international political cause and the head of Iran’s Council of Human Rights said last month there was “a good chance that her life could be saved.”
Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two, was sentenced to death by two different courts in the northwestern city of Tabriz in separate trials in 2006.
Her sentence to hang for her involvement in the murder of her husband was commuted to a 10-year jail term by an appeals court in 2007.
But a second death sentence by stoning on charges of adultery levelled over several relationships, notably with the man convicted of her husband’s murder, was upheld by another appeals court the same year.