Iran is the world’s top executioner of women. No country in the world has executed so many women, systematically.
The highest execution per capita in the world belongs to the clerical regime in Iran. During the 6-year presidency of Hassan Rouhani, more than 4,000 people have been executed in Iran with the real number probably higher.
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.
In defiance of the international laws which recommend other forms of punishments instead of imprisonment for women due to their role as mothers and care takers, women in Iran are not only jailed but executed.
Iran is the world’s top executioner of women. During Rouhani’s tenure alone, at least 97 women have been executed. Nine of these women have been executed in just 3.5 months this year since mid-June to the end of September. The Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran has compiled the names of these women in a list.
In her letter published on July 27, 2019, former political prisoner Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, addressed the issue of women charged with murder and their subsequent execution.
“In meeting women convicted of murder, I learned that a large percentage of them had murdered their husbands —instantly or based on a pre-meditated plan—after years of being humiliated, insulted, battered and even tortured by them and because of being deprived of their right to divorce. Although, they consider themselves criminals but are convinced that if any of their repeated appeals for divorce had been granted, they would not have committed such a crime,” Iraee writes.
These executions are cruelly unjust. As the NCRI Women’s Committee has formerly noted, the majority of the women executed are themselves victims of domestic violence and discriminatory family laws. Many resort to murder as their only avenue to defend themselves against mistreatment by their husbands and a system that miserably fails to protect them.