The Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran condemns the misogynist clerical regime’s membership in the executive board of UN Women. It is a shame for the UN, as a body responsible for defending the rights of women, to accept the membership of a misogynist regime where suppression and discrimination of women is carried out systematically and who openly defends acts of stoning, lashing and acid attacks of women.
In the 36 years of the mullahs’ rule, Iranian women have been deprived of their most primary rights in all political, legal and social spheres. This is a regime that legalized the marriages of step-fathers with their step-daughters and according to its own reports, is a regime where 40000 child brides between the ages of 9 and 13 have been given away. This is a regime that has ranked 137 out of 142 countries in this year’s Global Gender Gap report, standing next to countries such as Chad, the Ivory Coast, Mali and Syria. According to last year’s World Economic Forum report, the participation of women in political empowerment, economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, and health and survival was worse than ever.
This is regime in which women received only one-third of a man’s pay, if they even succeed in finding jobs (State-run Sharq daily, January 9, 2014) and are arrested for so-called improper-veiling. Finally, most important of all, this is a regime the legally deprives women from becoming presidents, judges … and where women’s inheritance is half and their testimony is worth half of that of a man’s.
