Resisting Death Row: Iran, Executions, and Women’s Human Rights Activists
Updated September 3, 2024
Sentencing activists to die is neither new to Iran, nor does it kill the beautiful ideas about freedom, justice, and democracy that drive activists to transgress authoritarianism. This month, in a period of 20 days, Iran executed more than 85 people. With more than 75% of the world’s recorded executions, what is notable this summer is not just Iran’s surge in sentencing people to die, including at least one child. The growing global movement to abolish the death penalty and end repression in Iran, emerging from within the country, is deeply feminist. For example, you can read about the ordeals of civil rights activist and cartoonist Atena Farghadani or human rights lawyers Mahnaz Parakand and Nasrin Sotoudeh. Iran routinely threatens human rights defenders, with arrest, torture, sham trials, imprisonment, and death sentences. You can scroll this comprehensive list of women who are political prisoners in Iran. As of this month, to strike fear in the hearts of everyday people, the Islamic Regime of Iran has resumed public hanging. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch issued this report documenting the surge in executions in the aftermath of the June elections, including 26 executions in one devastating August day.
Iran’s execution sprees, before and after 1979, have inflicted not just human rights violations but unending grief amongst loved ones and a sense of collective, generational punishment for attempts at social change. These frightful conditions are also a tinder box, galvanizing movements such as Woman Life Freedom or the current campaign against Iran’s use of the death penalty. Even more than a decade ago, for example during the One Million Signatures campaign to pressure Iranian legislators to remove laws that violate women’s human rights, Iran targeted women’s human rights activists. This is why small reforms without systemic shifts, in such dire contexts, are insufficient. While progressive global efforts, backed by science, are reframing drug-related conduct as medical rather than criminal in nature, in addition to criminalizing human rights defenders, Iran also increasingly executes drug offenders in a legal system that lacks due process. The repression is so lethal that it has become common global knowledge that Iran weaponizes the death penalty to suppress speech.
What is most egregious about Iran – as a notorious gender-segregator that marginalizes, criminalizes, and kills sexual minorities, diverse ethnicities, alleged drug offenders, and those who dare to speak out – is not just one thing. The egregiousness of Iran’s two-tiered legal system of explicit discrimination against women and girls or the offenses of a theocracy that criminalizes dissent as corruption, national security violations, or blasphemy comprises much more than the scope of a single blog post. But the point is, Iran specifically targets the diverse activists who challenge, criticize, and question the country’s violations of women’s human rights. In this context, the struggle for girls and women’s human rights in Iran, led by Iranian women, is widespread and deeply connected to a plethora of intersecting issues, not least of which include abolition of the death penalty.
This month, on August 6th, sparked by the execution of Reza Resai, the women’s ward at Evin prison participated in a “No to Executions” campaign. Who is Reza Resai? Back in November 2023, Amnesty International, along with other advocates, warned the world with this urgent action alert that this Kurdish activist, convicted based on tortured (and entirely unreliable) confessions, was sentenced to death. He was sentenced to death for his activism in the Woman Life Freedom movement, a popular struggle sparked by systemic violations of women’s human rights and the police killing of Jina Mahsa Amini–a woman arrested under Iran’s discriminatory morality code for her allegedly improper wearing of the hijab. Reza Resai was the 10th person executed in Iran this month in connection with the Woman Life Freedom movement.
For the No to Executions campaign, women in Evin gathered in the prison courtyard earlier this month to demand an end to the death sentences issued against other incarcerated women, such as Peshkan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi, Varisheh Moradi, and Nasim Golami Simiari – all of whom are human rights activists subjected to torture. Nasim Golami, for example, is on death row and accused of collusion against national security, propaganda against the state, and armed rebellion for participating in the Women Life Freedom protests.
Sharifieh Mohammadi is a labor activist. In July, after being tortured and held incommunicado, she was accused of links to labor organizations (allegedly) seeking armed rebellion against the state. Despite the fact that the suspected labor organizations had denied her membership, undermining the alleged crime of baghy (armed rebellion against the state), she was sentenced to death. You can read more about Sharifeh Mohammadi here and here. As a focal point of the No to Executions campaign, Pakhshan Azizi, a journalist, social worker, and activist, and was subjected to such severe torture that she can no longer walk. Vida Rabbani, in a heartfelt plea from prison, advocates on behalf of her cellmate Pakhshan Azizi.
Varisheh Moradi, who has been subjected to solitary confinement and public humiliation, announced in an open letter that she would not attend her second court hearing this month to protest the death sentences against Sharifieh Mohammadi and Pakhshan Azizi. You can read more about that here, and how her lawyers were denied access to even her case file or meeting with Moradi. As reported by Stop Honor Killings, an Iranian women’s human rights organization, Moradi wrote in her public letter, “They called me a savage and said I had lost my femininity. Why don’t you cry? When was the last time you cried? When was the last time you smelled a flower?” The prison guards violently attacked and brutalized the incarcerated women who spoke out against these death sentences, and then denied them access to medical care and visitation rights. You can read more about that here.
Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel Prize, was among the women who were brutalized by guards and then denied medical care. She advocates from within Evin, one of Iran’s most notorious prisons. Narges Mohammadi, continues to advocate despite the punitive context of activism in Iran in general and especially within Evin prison.
A report on the situation of these four women’s human rights activists facing the death penalty states,
It is clear to all that these women, as they have emphasized in their letters, have been fighting for social freedom and the right to life, especially for women. The pressures exerted by the government and the issuance of harsh sentences by the Islamic Republic and the judiciary are merely retaliation against the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its ideals, aimed at intimidating women activists and preventing the continuation of their just struggle.
There are so many more people Iran has executed, who are not named here, but whose names and lives also matter. Currently, there are 70 women political prisoners behind bars in Evin. Dozens of human rights organizations have come together to call for a death penalty moratorium and an independent investigation into Iran’s violence against women political prisoners. You can read the full text of the letter here. In 2023, Iran executed 853 people. Though the number of Iran’s judicial executions for 2024 are expected to continue to rise and as of September 3d of this year, Iran has killed 403 people on death row. Civil society organizations, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and even women in prison in Iran have called out these state sanctioned, court ordered executions of Iran’s human rights defenders. Alarmed by the execution surge in Iran, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has demanded a moratorium because amidst rampant violations of fair trial and due process rights, these executions are not just abhorrent but also unlawful. Listen to the incarcerated women in Evin prison protesting to end the death penalty.
Survivors of Iran’s affliction with criminalizing activists have dedicated their lives to advocate on behalf of the women inside. For anyone reading this, the question is inescapable – what will you do? To dig deeper, I spoke with Dr. Rezvan Moghaddam – a women’s human rights activist who has been in and out of Iran’s prisons. Sitting with her in my mom’s living room, I inquired what it is that she would like people to do. Both Rezvan and my mom replied in unison, to highlight the issue of executions in Iran. Rezvan also added, in a follow up phone call, “I think the most important thing is raising awareness, and also being the voice of the women who are subjected to patriarchy, Iran’s violence against women, and death sentences.”
Learning more about abolition, sharing on social media, and joining campaigns to support movements for human rights emerging from within Iran are always on the table. The No Death Penalty Tuesdays campaign, a hunger strike by political prisoners protesting weekly executions in Ghezel Hesar prison has expanded to 17 prisons across Iran, including Evin prison, and has grown into a global campaign. The global collective of 22 independent Iranian women’s rights organizations, has issued (originally in Farsi) a joint message of abolitionist solidarity. Alongside dozens of human rights organizations, we at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, have signed onto this urgent statement.