The daily newspaper "Bahar" (Spring) quoted Hojjatoleslam Qorbanali Dorri Najafabadi, the Head of the Supreme Court of Administrative Justice as having announced that the practice had been stopped "for a while".

Quoting a "well-informed source", the internet website "Iranian Women" said Friday that in their latest round of talks with Iranian officials, the European Union’s human rights delegations had made the abolition of the degrading punishment one of the conditions necessary for the conclusion of a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the Islamic Republic.

"The Europeans, during the behind closed-doors discussions, has put stiff conditions, one of them being the abolition of stoning women. Another condition was Iran’s unconditional endorsing of international conventions regarding scraping all discriminations against women. And contrary to Iranian authorities statements that they would not accept any preconditions from the EU, they had in fact accepted all the European’s demands", the "womeniniran.com" website added.

But Mrs. Shirin Ebadi, a prominent Iranian lawyer and human rights activist said it was not fair to credit the European Union or international human rights organisations for the scraping of stoning law and not pay tribute to the uphill struggle the Iranian women and rights groups had engaged for securing equal rights for Iranian women.

A statement by Hojjatoleslam Assadollah Mobasheri, Head of the Islamic Revolution Tribunal (IRT) of Tehran, announcing after the Iran-EU meeting that the Nationalist-religious and the Iran Freedom Movement (IFM) were not considered as groups "plotting to overthrow the Islamic Republic" was seen as a "great achievement" by the European Union’s policy of "positive engagement" with the regime of the ruling Iranian ayatollahs.

Under Iran's strict Islamic law, in place since the Islamic revolution of 1979, men and women convicted of adultery are usually sentenced to death by stoning, with condemned buried in a pit - men up to their waists, women their armpits - and pelted with stones, not too big to kill the victim with the first throws. If the victims manage to dig themselves out, they are acquitted.

Though officials do not always announce capital punishments by stoning, but at least two cases of women being stoned to death last year have been recorded.

According to Mrs. Ebadi, because stoning is not clearly mentioned in the Qor’an, the Muslim’s holly book, high-ranking religious authorities for Shi’a Muslims have different interpretation of the stoning law.

But other mojtahed, or sources of imitation do not agree with this view, arguing that it is to the Muslim’s societies to adapt themselves with Islamic laws and not otherwise.

The European Union’s "positive engagement" with Iran was seen by many observers as opposed to the Bush Administration’s "iron fist", placing the Islamic Republic among the "evil states", which also includes Communist North Korea and Fascist Iraq.

But better informed Iranian analysts said both the European and American approaches to Tehran are the two sides of the same coin, aimed at "taming" the ruling Iranian ayatollahs in the one hand and opening the Iranian political scene to new alternative.