The Criminal Court of Urmia Province recently upheld and finalized the death decree for Zahra Derakhshan, who has been behind bars at Khoy Prison since November 2016. Derakhshan was originally given the death decree in November 2018, but she objected to the court ruling and appealed her sentence.

Khoy is the second-largest city, after Urmia, in West Azerbaijan Province, northwestern Iran.

While a woman known only as Fariba was sentenced to death for killing a police officer when she tried to help a prisoner escape. Her lawyer objected to the death decree, according to Mohammad Reza Habibi, the general director of Isfahan’s Department of Justice. However, the supreme court upheld the ruling on September 3.

The two women executed in September were Leila Zarafshan, in the Central Prison of Sanandaj on September 26, and an unidentified woman in Gohardasht Prison in Karaj on September 25.

This is a worrying trend in Iran. In fact, the number of women executed in Iran over the past few months has ramped up, coinciding with an overall attempt to increase pressure on Iranian women.

Eight women have been executed in just over three months, but the yearly totals from 2016 to 2018 were only between 6 and 10.

So far, 96 women have been executed since the supposed moderate Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013. And these are just the numbers reported on in the state-run press based on information provided by the Judiciary. The real numbers are much higher because the Iranian Regime always tries to downplay statistics that make them look bad.

Iran is the world record holder in executions per capita; routinely executing people for their political beliefs or non-violent crimes. They have a particularly poor record of executing women for murder without taking into account the circumstances, such as potential domestic abuse.

In a religious, patriarchal society, such as Iran, women have nowhere to turn when they become victims of domestic abuse. They have no power to leave their husbands because they do not have the right to divorce or to have custody over their children, who are also victims. They will suffer until they are murdered or until they kill their abuser because the Regime doesn’t care about women and they never will.