It is clear that Iran is one of the worst countries in the world for women. In Iran’s legal system, which is based on the concept of Sharia, it is impossible for a woman to have the same rights as a man.
As a first step, freedom of dress, one of the most natural rights of every human being, is not officially recognized in Iran, and women are required to wear the obligatory Islamic hijab. Although 40 years have passed since this forced situation and several generations have grown up in the system of the Islamic Republic, the result has not been what it was desired.
Protests against the mandatory Islamic hijab are growing day by day. In a wave of protests by women’s rights activists that have been going on for years, women are using different tactics to protest against the forced headscarf or the Islamic hijab. Although these protests are not sufficiently supported by men and even other human rights activists, women express their desires with great self-sacrifice.
These protests have already been made public with the help of women’s rights activists, including Masih Alinejad. The Islamic Republic, like all repressive regimes, is extremely concerned about the infiltration of internal affairs, so it is doing its best to prevent the oppression of women from remaining inside.
On the other hand, activists from the Islamic Republic, who appear to be particularly moderate and soft-spoken, have said that women in Iran have more important problems than the forced hijab and have called for them to be concentrated.
There are many serious and controversial examples of this in the country, but one of the most important and well-known examples is the punishment for violence against women and the government’s approach to the issue.
Some time ago, a blood-curdling crime took place near the Azerbaijani city of Talysh. The father of a girl named Romina Ashrafi beheaded her 13-year-old daughter for running away with her boyfriend. At that time, there was a lot of controversy inside and outside Iran. Many Iranian officials have spoken out about the sensitivity of the community.
Even the Chief of the Emergency Forces, Chief Ibrahim, promised that the matter would be taken seriously. But now the court has sentenced Romina Ashrafi’s father to only nine years in prison. According to Iranian law, if a father kills his daughter, the daughter does not have the same rights as a man according to the father’s authority over her daughter. No matter how illogical this word may sound in this period, it is one of the thousand and one bitter truths of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In those days, when everyone was shocked by the light sentence given to Romina Ashrafi’s father, another terrible news came. Saba Kord Afshari, who protested against the obligatory Islamic hijab, was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
These two examples are a mirror of the legal system against women in Iran. A woman protesting against the mandatory Islamic hijab is sentenced to 24 years in prison, but the beheading of a 13-year-old girl by her grandfather with a sickle is only 9 years.
