To the Iranian Parliament: Immediately halt any further consideration of the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice and permanently withdraw the bill. Modify all other pending legislation related to women’s employment, higher education, and family planning to ensure that they do not discriminate against women ...

In 2014, a series of acid attacks against women in the Iranian city of Isfahan convulsed the nation. The assaults involved unidentified men flinging acid into ...

In a cabinet meeting on October 26, 2014, President Rouhani said, “The government will investigate these events [referring to the acid attacks] with all its capacity so that justice can be done with regards to the perpetrator[s] and so that [they] receive maximum punishment.” ...

In 2014, a series of acid attacks on women in public places occurred in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The attacks involved unidentified men flinging acid into the faces of young women, who were usually sitting in cars. In a number of the attacks, eyewitnesses ...

In addition to national legislation, the state has moved forward with other initiatives that restrict women’s ability to participate in public life. Most notably, the state has promoted gender-based university admissions policies that are highly discriminatory to women. Ironically, the Islamic Republic has long pointed to ...

Taken together, these bills represent a concerted state-sanctioned assault on women’s basic rights and freedoms. More troubling, the specific call for citizen enforcement in the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice is effectively a state-sanctioned invitation to vigilante justice. Indeed, we have already seen ...

In April 2014, Parliament took up the Plan to Increase Birth Rate and Prevent Population Decline. The Shargh newspaper reported that this bill banned abortion, vasectomy, and tubectomy, and punished the prevention of pregnancy by two to five years in prison. As the public outcry ...

In June 2013, the outgoing Ahmadinejad administration introduced the Reducing Women’s Work Hours Bill. This bill mandates a reduction in hours women are allowed to work. Its proponents claim this is meant to increase the time women spend at home and with their children. In an ...

In May 2013, the Comprehensive Population and Family Plan was introduced into the Iranian Parliament. The bill, which aims to encourage population growth, seeks to re-assert long-standing views held by conservatives in the Islamic Republic which hold that is against women’s nature to work outside ...

In addition to the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, other state initiatives imposing ultraconservative views that significantly limit women’s ability to participate in public life have been put forward as well. Most of these legislative actions were initiated under the previous Ahmadinejad administration, ...

While there were expectations that the status of women would improve after Rouhani’s victory, this has not proved to be the case. During his presidential campaign, Rouhani’s remarks in support of women’s rights were unequivocal: “Men and women are equal in the eyes of Islam ...

Hassan Rouhani’s election in June 2013 triggered a backlash by hardline state officials and conservative clerics anxious to assert their dominance in the domestic sphere. Women’s issues, always dominant in the ideology of the Islamic Republic, assumed particular importance in this power struggle and use ...

Prior to the state clampdown on media coverage of the acid attacks (which included the arrest of photographers and editors covering peaceful gatherings meant to draw attention to the attacks and the lack of any arrests in the cases), there was a significant amount of ...

The designation of the Basij as the principal enforcers of the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice formalized the role of vigilante groups that had in fact already become active in the run-up to the legislation. Indeed, the movement to propel rigid public enforcement ...

Since the election in June 2013 of Hassan Rouhani, who campaigned on a platform that included the promotion women’s rights, the Iranian Parliament has moved forward on a number of pieces of legislation that seek to impose ultraconservative notions of female piety on the population. ...