Iran

Change for Equality: Over 1200 women’s rights activists and equal rights defenders have signed a statement objecting to the draft "Family Protection" bill currently in Parliament, which they claim will erode women’s rights within the family even further. The statement issued by a coalition of women’s rights activists working to prevent the ratification of this draft bill, which they have dubbed the "Anti-Family Bill" appears below.

People of Iran, men and women

The Legal and Judicial Commission of the Islamic Consultative Assembly of the Parliament, has recently re-introduced the so-called “Protection of Family Bill” to the parliament with changes to articles 23 and 25 and rushed it through parliament for ratification among the political chaos in the country. This bill is ineffective to support the institution of family and is far behind the bill that was ratified some 35 years ago in 1974.

by Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women in Iran before 1979 and president of Women's Learning Partnership

The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government's version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would not have been possible without them. It is their quiet and thoughtful community organization, constituency building, message development, and pioneering use of the internet in recent years that accounts for the scope of the protest in Iran. Their grassroots mobilization has showed that more lies at the heart of democratization than burning tires and shouting slogans, and that a democracy requires more than ballot boxes and purple-inked fingers. And that accomplishment will prove consequential not only for Iran's future but also for the future of the whole Middle East.

As a student of the women's movement in my native land for nearly four decades and an intimate observer of their recent struggles, I can say with confidence that women's leading role in these events has been no accident. Iranian women began fighting for their rights over a century ago, at the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and have not stopped since. In the 1930s and 40s they formed their first effective associations. In the 1960s they struggled and succeeded in getting the right to vote and be elected and once in parliament they were able to replace archaic family laws with new progressive ones. In 1979, they joined the nation's drive for political freedom, but this time they did not get what they had fought for. The revolution swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power and in less than a month after his triumph, before there was a constitution or a government, the ayatollah annulled the new family law and decreed obligatory veiling and gender apartheid.

Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani of the Feminist School Interviews Mahnaz Afkhami

Family laws in Muslim-majority societies determine most crucial rights for women, and often serve as a barometer for women's overall social status. Across Muslim-majority societies women are advocating for reform of these laws to accommodate their changed family and social roles, and to reflect their heightened awareness of their individual rights.

On July 26, 2006, Ashraf Kalhori, a 37 year old mother of four, learned that her sentence of death by stoning was about to be carried out. Until that point, the punishment of stoning, which had officially been under a moratorium since 2002, had remained a taboo topic in Iranian public discourse. Ms. Kalhori’s case, however, mobilized a group of lawyers and transnational women’s activists who were concerned that this unmentionable punishment was in fact becoming more commonplace. From this seed, the “Stop Stoning Forever” campaign, and ultimately the work of Women’s Field (Meydaan), a trailblazing website and network of women’s rights activists in Iran, took root.

Presented by Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) in cooperation with the Dialogue Project of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

February 8, 2008

In a significant setback for the women’s movement in Iran, the Press Supervisory Board of Iran backed by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, revoked the license of Zanan, the country’s most prominent and important women’s magazine. Zanan, which means “women” in Persian, is a monthly magazine dedicated to the reporting and analysis of women’s issues, problems, and achievements.

In November, WLP published the Persian edition of the Guide to Equality in the Family in the Maghreb for use by Iranian women’s rights activists in the "One Million Signatures" campaign for equal legal rights and family law reform. The campaign, launched in August 2006, aims to collect one million signatures and spread grassroots awareness of discriminatory laws such as those related to marriage, divorce, and child custody.

The arguments for family law reform presented in the Guide will help provide support to the legal reform efforts of the One Million Signatures campaign. The Guide is a unique advocacy tool developed by Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité, a coalition of women’s organizations from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, that presents the current state of the family law in the Maghreb, and proposes religious, human rights, sociological, and legal arguments for reform, well-supported by relevant data.

~The book is available for order ($24.95) or free download.~