The Iranian regime executed its 117th woman during the tenure of President Hassan Rouhani on May 23 in the Central prison of Yazd, which is unsurprising because at least 15 women have been executed in Iran every year for the past eight.
The executed woman was identified as Kobra Fatemi, 41, who was charged with her husband’s murder in 2015 and has been in prison ever since. The victim’s family had agreed to accept blood money and spare Fatemi from execution, except for the victim’s uncle, who was a member of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and requested that the death penalty be carried out.
The Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) wrote: “Many of the women executed by the mullahs’ regime are themselves victims of domestic violence against women and acted in self-defence. However, the Iranian Judiciary does not categorize deliberate murders and punishes them with the death penalty regardless of the motivation and reason.”
Iran is the world’s number one executioner per capita, as well as the world’s top executioner of women, with the majority of death penalty sentences handed down for offences that do not meet the international standard for the death penalty.
Since 2013, when Rouhani became President, 4,300 people have been executed, but of course, the number of total executions and those of women is likely to be much higher because they are carried out in secret so that the regime can attempt to avoid the deserved international condemnation.
The NCRI Women’s Committee said: “The Iranian regime open-handedly uses the death penalty as a form of punishment. In many cases and in a discriminatory manner, this punishment is carried out against the religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, and women.”
With particular regard to the regime’s state-sponsored violence against women, the committed listed the following actions that cause physical, mental, sexual, emotional, and social harm to women.
Enforcement of the mandatory hijab,
The parliament admits that 70% of Iranian women don’t believe in forcing the veil onto women and over 2,000 women per day are arrested for improper veiling. Not only is it ridiculous that 27 government agencies are tasked with enforcing the hijab, but the punishments are gross and disgusting. These include acid attacks, beatings, and decades in prison on trumped-up charges.
Child marriages
Girls can be married off as young as nine years old and the regime has rejected proposals to increase the minimum marrying age to 16, which would still be two years too young. Some 600,000 underage girls are registered as married every year and, in 2017, 234,000 of them were under 15.
Domestic Violence
In 2018 alone, some 77,059 women sought medical attention as a result of domestic abuse, but this figure should be considered a minimum when you consider the misogynistic society that discourages women from seeking help for male violence, especially when there is no legal way for a woman to end her marriage to an abuser.
