October 14, 2022
According to one human rights group, a quarter of all the women executed in Iran over the last decade have been hanged for killing abusive husbands.
But a husband who recently killed his wife in an “honor-killing” has reportedly been set free while the reporter who first revealed the case has been sent to prison for more than two years for “publishing lies.”
Human Rights Monitor, a group affiliated with the Mojahedin-e Khalq, reported that Iran executed 164 women between 2010 and 2021. Of those, 60 were hanged for murder and in 40 of those cases the women were convicted of killing abusive husbands.
One complaint of critics of the Islamic Republic is that it provides no support for wives who are abused by their husbands. In many cases, those wives were married off as children. The Judiciary provides leniency for honor killings, by excluding capital punishment, but treats a spousal murder by an aggrieved wife as simple murder deserving of the maximum penalty of death.
Amnesty International reported that Iran has executed 252 people in the first six months of 2022 or almost 10 people per week. That is a toll double that of the first half of 2021.
In the case of the recent honor-killing, reporter Sina Qalandari was sentenced to 27 months in prison and banned from media activities for two years. On August 10, Qalandari posted a picture of the court’s notification on Twitter and wrote that this verdict was issued only because “I exposed the murder of Mobina Suri at the hands of her husband,” who is a clergyman.
He wrote: “The plaintiffs in the case gave me consent [to publish the news] and the killer has also confessed to killing his wife.”
Sixteen-year-old Mobina Suri was killed August 30 of last year by her husband. Sharq daily reported August 9 that after 11 months “the killer is free and the journalist who helped the country’s judicial system to arrest the killer by revealing the truth is in prison.”