Human Rights Watch denounced on Monday the Afghan government's consideration of punishing criminals guilty of adultery to death by stoning.
The rights organization reported from Kabul that President Hamid Karzai should "reject this proposal out of hand," calling it a return to Taliban-esque forms of corporal punishment, the Los Angeles Times reported.
According to the Associated Press, a spokesperson with the Justice Ministry did not confirm that the government had pondered bringing back public execution by stoning.
But a member of the sharia legislation board, Rohullah Qarizada, said that the committee was drafting a new penal code, and was considering resuming the punishment.
"We are working on the draft of a sharia penal code where the punishment for adultery, if there are four eyewitnesses, is stoning," Qarizada, who also works as the head of the Afghan Independent Bar Association told Reuters.
The new code, which will take the place of a 1976 draft that does not enforce stoning as a punishment, will take more than two years to finish writing and begin enforcing, according to Justice Ministry representative Mohammad Ashraf Azimi.
"As a member of the department for the punishment laws, I haven't seen this part of the law they are mentioning," Azimi said, in regards to Human Rights Watch's issue. "I don't know where they found it and why they are emphasizing it. We are the people working on it and we haven't seen it."
During the 1996-2001 age of Taliban rule, officials performed public stoning of adulterers often. Since the U.S. invasion at the end of 2001, authorities were barred from carrying out such penalties. But reports of the punishments still occurring in rural areas surfaced periodically.
"It is absolutely shocking that 12 years after the fall of the Taliban government, the Karzai administration might bring back stoning as a punishment," Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the Los Angeles Times. "President Karzai needs to demonstrate at least a basic commitment to human rights and reject this proposal."
