The reported hanging of a child bride victim in Iran has triggered outrage. Human rights organisation Hengaw wrote on April 29 that the country’s authorities had executed Hanifeh Avandi, a 24-year-old Turkish woman from Tabriz. She was thought to have been a victim of child and forced marriage. The execution was carried out at dawn on Sunday, April 19, in Tabriz Central Prison, the organisation added.
It is believed that Avandi was sentenced to death under qisas, the Islamic legal principle of “retaliation in kind”, after allegedly intentionally killing her husband five years ago, after 11 months of marriage. Sources are purported to have said that told Avandi had been forced by her family to marry a disabled man when she was 17.
It is said that Avandi had suffered from severe psychological distress during her imprisonment, and was under medical supervision.
Human rights activist Turkan Bozkurt suggested that conditions produced her death: “forced marriage as a child, a husband she could not leave, a legal system that gave his family the right to kill her, and a prison physician whose objections carried no binding force”.
These “are not exceptional features of her case”, they added, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The CEO of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy and an Israel-based journalist, Rachel Avraham, suggested on the newspaper’s website that the world should be outraged by Avandi’s death.
She stated: “For a child to be forced into marriage is a form of rape. If the child had preexisting psychological problems before experiencing such sexual abuse, then she definitely did not deserve the death penalty, even if she killed her husband.”
Ms Avraham added: “One must ponder, where is the Me Too Movement? Where is the United Nations? Where are Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International? Where are The New York Times and The Washington Post? Where are the campus feminist protesters when we need them most?
“Why is Greta Thunberg not organizing a flotilla to save oppressed South Azerbaijani women in Iran, who are at imminent risk of facing the death penalty?”
