Iranian women and men have been actively working for gender equality in a vibrant, diverse, and independent women’s rights movement. However, in recent years there has been a surge in pressures on women’s rights defenders in Iran. Legal justifications for arrests and harassments of women’s rights defenders are often vague and unreasonable.
In fact, these arrests, prosecutions, and harassment appear to be part of a strategy to suppress the whole movement for gender equality. Iran Women’s Movement Watch is a collaborative project by several concerned Iranian women’s rights activists and human rights advocates with the aim of creating a website solely dedicated to sharing reliable information about the pressures on women’s rights activists in Iran.
The website is intended to consolidate information from several reliable women’s rights websites. Enormous attention has been paid to ensure that the data presented here is accurate. In most cases, activists with charges have been contacted directly to provide or confirm information about their cases. The individuals mentioned in the database have been subjected to different type of pressures which in most cases a legal case has been opened against the activist but not always it has lead to an arrest. In some cases, the activists have been banned from continued education, working in their career or traveling.
This website is designed to be accessible to and usable by human rights organizations, women’s rights activists, analysts, journalists, bloggers, and the other members of the concerned public. Our long term intention is to present this information in a variety of formats. News articles, analyses and commentaries, a database of arrests, statistical summaries and multimedia presentations will be combined to give a fuller picture of the ongoing condition of women’s rights defenders and help identify clear trends in the repression they face.
We believe that all around the world, including in Iran, human rights and women’s rights defenders must be safe from harassment and persecution. Their safety and well-being must be protected especially when they work peacefully in order to bring about change in their country’s laws. Solidarity with these activists on the part of like-minded international civil society groups and organizations can help reduce the pressures they face and contribute to assuring their safety.
