Shayan Ghajar
As tensions between Iran and the United States reach levels unprecedented in recent years, the United States seeks to pressure nations and corporations with a stake in Iran’s oil industry to join in an embargo on the Islamic Republic’s most lucrative source of revenue. more»
Staff
The Iranian response to the recent IAEA report has been quick, dismissive, and defiant.
Lawmakers, politicians, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp commanders have bluntly attacked the report and questioned the credibility and independence of the IAEA, charging the Agency with illegally conducting its proceedings and accepting fabricated evidence. All have vehemently reiterated a commitment to the continuing progress of Iran’s nuclear program. more»
Shayan Ghajar
On October 16, in an otherwise unremarkable and routine speech, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dropped a potent political bomb by suggesting that Iran could easily transition from a system with a presidency to a parliamentary-based system with an appointed prime minister. The comment, however brief, was certainly intended as a major warning to the politically rebellious faction spearheaded by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and may even indicate a sincere intent to abolish the presidency in Iran. Indeed, a number of statements by powerful elites before and after Khamenei’s speech seem to lend credence to the idea that Ahmadinejad may be one of Iran’s last presidents.
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Women’s Rights Activists Attain Victory Against “Family Protection Bill”
Shayan Ghajar
Women’s rights activists and reformist parliamentarians achieved a victory Monday against a controversial “Family Protection Bill,” forcing three of its most restrictive articles to be tabled for future evaluation and alteration.
Iranian Labour News Agency reports that articles 22, 23, and 24 of the bill will be sent to a legal and judiciary committee for review to ensure that they are in accord with Islamic law. These three articles proved to be the most contentious, as they would have significantly eroded women’s rights in Iran. The three articles sought to impose taxation of women’s alimony and dowry, remove the requirement to register temporary marriages, and to eliminate the need for a husband to prove financial solvency or ask his wife’s permission before marrying another woman.
The provisions would have placed additional burdens on women by making divorce even more costly for women than it already is in Iran, as well as essentially relieving a husband of all responsibility to maintain equitable treatment of his wives if he engages in polygamy. Moreover, the provision removing the need to register temporary marriages would facilitate the abuse of the practice, which has been used alternately as either a legally sanctioned way for youth to date without incurring the wrath of morality police, or just as often, an excuse for a thriving prostitution industry in Iran’s holy cities.
The bill, proposed three years ago by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, was tabled in 2008 due to the efforts of a diverse alliance of activists protesting its degradation of the status of women. However, the bill’s supporters retaliated by adding numerous provisions to the bill that are even more injurious to women’s civil rights. Golnaz Esfandiari reports that the provisions would have allowed a husband to take a second wife without permission from his current wife for a number of reasons, ranging from the first wife’s becoming sterile to her contraction of a terminal illness.
Fatemeh Govarayi, a women’s rights activist in Tehran, asserts in Esfandiari’s article that the timing of the bill’s reintroduction is no coincidence. The massive arrests of Green Movement supporters and numerous women’s rights activists opened a convenient window of opportunity for hardliners in parliament to try to push the bill through.
However, the bill has been tabled due largely to the efforts of a coalition similar to that which first defeated the bill in 2008. This victory for the reformists and moderates in the Iranian parliament is even more significant due to the enormous setbacks they experienced following the massive crackdowns on the Green Movement this year. Female parliamentarians, with few exceptions, lobbied exceptionally hard against the bill, with most promising to vote against it. Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, who helped defeat the bill in 2008, spoke out vociferously against it from her home-in-exile in the U.K.
Prominent Green Movement figure Zahra Rahnavard, longtime campaigner for women’s rights in Iran, also spoke vehemently against the bill (scroll down for her statement), inviting the parliamentarians that support it to consider how they would feel if their daughters were subject to the stigma of a temporary marriage and asking if the female parliamentarians would be willing to let their husbands engage in polygamy at their expense.
Although the political purges of the last year have been largely successful at removing reformists and women’s rights activists from official positions of power, the LA Times quotes (first link in article) one Iranian journalist covering the bill’s defeat as saying, “Now it is proven that the lobbying of former female lawmakers in parliament was successful and that the reformist [members of parliament] are still influential, even if they are no longer in parliament.”
This victory was a remarkable accomplishment for reformists considering the gargantuan pressures brought to bear against them, and the attempts made by the Ahmadinejad administration to exile them to the margins of Iran’s political establishment.