Violence against women

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning, was told on Saturday that she was to be hanged at dawn on Sunday, but the sentence was not carried out, it emerged tonight. Mohammadi Ashtiani wrote her will and embraced her cellmates in Tabriz prison just before the call to morning prayer, when she expected to be led to the gallows, her son Sajad told the Guardian. "Pressure from the international community has so far stopped them from carrying out the sentence but they're killing her every day by any means possible," he said.

A Saudi couple tortured their Sri Lankan maid by hammering 24 nails into her hands, legs and forehead, after she complained of a too heavy workload, officials said today. Nearly 2 million Sri Lankans sought employment overseas last year and around 1.4 million, mostly maids, were employed in the Middle East. Many have complained of physical abuse or harassment. LT Ariyawathi, a 49-year old mother of three, returned home on Friday after five months in Saudi Arabia.

The lives and hopes of Samar (31) and Juwariya (25) Atique were brutally crushed in October 2009 by two men who threw a jug of acid on their faces as the women were returning home from a day's work in a rickshaw. Their crime - Juwariya had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the men! They sustained severe burns and injuries to their faces, their eyes and their upper bodies. In acid attack cases, the victims should be hosed down gently with a continuous stream of water immediately to stop the acid continuing to burn into their flesh. But they did not get treatment for five hours after the incident because the woman doctor was threatened with a similar attack by these men and their families.

When Aynur Mammadova, who is now a prostitute working the bars of Baku, was 16, she thought she had a chance of escaping a childhood of poverty in southern Azerbaijan for a better life. She met an Iranian called Javad who asked her to marry her, and her parents, struggling to support her and her three sisters and two brothers, were happy to agree to the match. The couple went through the Muslim wedding rite, and that was enough for her family even though they did not register the marriage with the civil authorities. “We celebrated our marriage in Lenkoran and lived together for a week,” Mammadova recalled. “Then Javad said he was taking me on honeymoon to the United Arab Emirates. I said goodbye to my parents, and we set off. But when we got to Dubai, he took me to a strange place, which turned out to be a criminal hang-out. I never saw my husband again.”