Iran executes three women in single day as concern grows: NGO

Iran this week executed three women in the space of a single day, all on charges of murdering their husbands, an NGO said on Friday.

There has been growing concern over the increasing number of women being hanged in Iran as the country sees a surge in executions.

Many killed husbands who were abusive or they married as child brides or even relatives, activists say.

Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said that on July 27 three women were executed in different prisons for murdering their husbands in separate cases, meaning at least 10 women have now been executed by Iran in 2022.

Senobar Jalali, an Afghan national, was executed in a prison outside Tehran, it said.

Meanwhile Soheila Abedi, who had married her husband when aged just 15, was hanged in a prison in the city of Sanandaj in western Iran.

She had committed the murder 10 years after their marriage and was convicted in 2015, IHR said.

Faranak Beheshti, who had been convicted around five years ago for the murder of her husband, was executed in the prison in the northwestern city of Urmia, it said.

Activists argue that Iran's laws are stacked against women, who do not have the right to unilaterally demand a divorce, even in cases of domestic violence and abuse.

A report by IHR published in October last year said that at least 164 women were executed between 2010 and October 2021.

But activists are alarmed by a surge in executions in Iran this year, coinciding with the rise of former judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi to the presidency in 2021 and protests over an economic crisis.

At least 306 people have been executed so far in Iran in 2022, according to a count by IHR.

Washington-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre for Human Rights in Iran and London-based Amnesty International said Wednesday that Iran is carrying out executions at a "horrifying pace" in an "abhorrent assault" on the right to life.

Those arrested in recent weeks in a crackdown against critical voices include the director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose lacerating film "There is No Evil" about the effects of the use of the death penalty in Iran won the Golden Bear at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.