BBC News has yet another example of what passes for justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran:
A teenage girl and two young men in Iran have been sentenced to lashes for having sex.
The court dismissed the girl's claim that she was raped. It said she had sex of her own free will, the official Iran Daily newspaper reported.
The girl was sentenced to 100 lashes because her accusations of rape and kidnap could have landed her partners a death penalty, the Tehran judge said. Sex outside marriage is illegal in Iran and capital punishment can be imposed. The young men in the case were sentenced to 30 and 40 lashes each.
The Iran paper quotes the girl, who has not been named, as confessing: "I trusted one of these young men, whom I got to know by phone, and went to his place. "But because he betrayed me, I filed the case against him and his friend out of revenge."
International concerns continue to be raised about women's rights in Iran. In December the UN General Assembly voted to censure Iran for human rights violations, including discrimination against women and girls. Tehran rejected the criticism as propaganda.
Under Iranian law, girls over the age of nine and boys over 16 face the death penalty for crimes such as rape and murder, while capital punishment can be imposed in certain cases of illegal sexual relationships.
That lashings were administered to the young girl in this case is horrifying enough, that she received two and a half to three times the number that the boys did is symptomatic of a mindset so depraved that we lack the words to describe it. If this is Islamic law one wonders what in the world the appeal of Islam is to anyone with a shred of human decency or compassion. One also wonders whether the world can afford to permit nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of men who think like these mullahs do.
