Home News Human Rights Recent Rise in suicides by Iranian Women highlight ongoing human rights abuses

Recent Rise in suicides by Iranian Women highlight ongoing human rights abuses

Her story is similar to that of a 23-year-old political science student who took her own life after spending four months in prison.

“These heart-wrenching stories are but a small portion of the gross human rights violations committed by the religious fundamentalist rulers of Iran. Raping female prisoners is a common practice in Iran,” writes Soona Samsami, the representative in the United States for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in a recent article for The Hill.

 In a report recently released by Amnesty International, the Human Rights Group condemned Tehran for “heavily” suppressing “the rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly and religious belief.”

“Women and girls,” it added, “faced pervasive violence and discrimination.”

Highlighted in the report is the regime’s “extensive use of the death penalty, carrying out hundreds of executions, some in public.” It stated, “At least two juvenile offenders were executed” in 2016.

Ms. Samsami writes, “Since the start of 2017, the theocracy has been conducting an execution every 8 hours, on average. In the first two weeks of February, 25 youth were among the victims, all under the age of 30. There are officially 160 juveniles on death row in Iran, but the real figures are much higher.”

The regime’s “moderate” president Hassan Rouhani, who has negotiated with some western businesses for trade opportunities after the Iran nuclear deal, continues to allow these things to occur. 

It was recently reported that a 14-year-old girl was beaten and arrested by “morality police” for wearing ripped jeans on her birthday.

In the city of Dezful, two women were arrested for riding a motorcycle. A state-run news agency reported that a local police commander stated that the women “committed an action against revolutionary norms and values by riding a motorcycle.”

The people of Iran have endured four decades of suppressing dissent, torture and executions, as well as the legalization of misogyny, killings in the streets, and stoning women to death.

Nearly 30 years ago, in the summer of 1988, the Iranian regime executed as many as 30,000 political prisoners, as part of a fatwa.  Most of the victims were young supporters of the main opposition, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Last August, an audio tape was published for the first time. Hossein-Ali Montazeri, one of the regime’s highest officials, is heard on it, telling other regime officials that the executions amount to “the biggest crime in the Islamic Republic, for which history will condemn us.”

Montazeri also admitted that girls as young as 15, and even pregnant women, were among the victims of the massacre. Montazeri died under house arrest for speaking his conscience in 2009.

Six human rights groups with consultative status to the United Nations human rights body joined together, and on March 1, they issued a statement to the current session of the Human Rights Council condemning the 1988 massacre. They recommended that the UN High Commissioner for human rights and the UN Human Rights Council appoint an international commission to investigate the massacre. They called upon Asma Jahangir, the special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, and Pablo de Greiff, the special rapporteur on the promotion of truth, to conduct separate inquiries into the massacre.

“Enough is enough,” writes Ms. Samsami. “In light of the regime’s abhorrent human rights abuses, western governments cannot morally or strategically engage the mullahs. The United States should adopt a firm and principled policy that holds Tehran accountable for its crimes and terrorism and embraces the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people, the West’s true allies.  Too many of Iran’s young girls have been mistreated, abused, tortured and killed. Mahdis should have been alive to rebuild Iran. If the thousands of young women and men were not massacred by a brutal regime in 1988 or throughout the past 40 years, they would have had an opportunity to create a democratic, peaceful, non-nuclear and generous Iran.”

 

 

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