The National Council of Resistance of Iran’s Women’s Committee in its monthly report, while honoring the memory of Romina Asharafi, a teenage girl slaughtered by her father in a so-called “honor killing,” stressed that due to the Iranian regime’s medieval and misogynist policies, “thousands of Rominas in Iran are defenseless victims of the savage laws of the clerical regime.”
The NCRI Women’s Committee had previously highlighted in its statement on May 28 that the tragic beheading of Romina Ashraf was “The outcome of the oppressive and medieval policies and laws of the misogynist clerical regime that encourage and promote violence against women and girls. The religious fascism ruling Iran is responsible for the murder of Romina Ashrafi.”
While pointing to the regime’s misogynist and medieval constitution, the NCRI Women’s Committee wrote in its monthly report of May 2020: “Instead of creating protective mechanisms, the Iranian regime’s laws promote violence against women. The Punishment Law has four chapters which contain 37 articles dealing with the most personal sexual issues. Using a repulsive language, these articles prescribe fierce punishments such as stoning, execution and flogging for sexual offenses. (Articles 224 to 261 of the Islamic Punishment Law adopted in April 2013).”
“Rampant poverty, inadequate education, limited access to information, and promotion of a misogynous culture by all media, text books, radio and television, and even movies, coupled with the common practice of violence in the streets and the scenes of public flogging and execution to create an atmosphere of terror and repression and fend off popular uprisings, lead to circumstances which legitimize honor killings and make murderers out of fathers and brothers,” the report added.
In its report, the NCRI Women’s Committee pointed to dozens of “honor killings” announced by the state-run media and asserted: “Although honor killings are not compiled and registered as official statistics, but the token examples occasionally published in the local and national press are horrifying. “
“Even if the savageries inflicted on women do not end up in their deaths, they have adverse consequences for the lives of thousands of young women and girls. A Welfare Organization advisor, Fatemeh Abbasi, announced that some 1,040 girls had fled home in 2017. Forty percent of these girls were under 15. She acknowledged that this figure was limited to the cases known to the Welfare Organization and that there are no accurate statistics available on the total number of runaway girls in the country,” read the report.
The latest monthly report published by the NCRI Women’s Committee once again shows that the Iranian regime with its medieval and misogynist nature has no respect for the Iranian people’s lives, particularly women.
As the Iranian Resistance has repeatedly said, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, the Human Rights Council, international forums, and the UN special rapporteurs for women and children’s rights must condemn the Iranian regime for its misogynist laws and practices that perpetuate such killings.