This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
What do an Iranian aid worker, a labor activist, a political campaigner, and a protester have in common?
All four are women who have been charged in Iran with armed rebellion against the state — which carries the death sentence — in recent months.
Two of them — aid worker Pakhshan Azizi and labor activist Sharifeh Mohammadi — have already been sentenced to death. Political activist Varisheh Moradi and protester Nasim Gholami Simiyari are awaiting their sentences.
Besides Simiyari, all the women have been accused of being members of opposition Kurdish groups outside Iran. Azizi and Moradi are both members of Iran’s Kurdish minority, which has long been suppressed.
There has been a rise in the number of women sentenced to death and executed since unprecedented antiestablishment protests erupted in 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman.
Fear Of Execution
Mohammadi, the labor activist, was sentenced to death in July. She was accused of membership in an independent labor union and a banned Kurdish separatist group based in neighboring Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Her family has said she was not affiliated with any political organization inside or outside the country.
Mohammadi’s cousin, Vida Mohammadi, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that she was tortured in prison following her arrest in December and that she had spent several months in solitary confinement.
Moradi, the Kurdish political activist, was arrested in August 2023.
She was accused of being a member of the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), the Iranian offshoot of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
Azizi, the aid worker, was also arrested in August 2023 and accused of membership in PJAK, which she has denied. She was sentenced to death in July.
She spent time in Iraqi Kurdistan as well as in northeastern Syria, home to the Arab country’s Kurdish minority, to help people displaced by the civil war and the fight against the Islamic State extremist group.
In a letter written from prison before her conviction, Azizi said working in refugee camps in Syria “could have been one of the biggest moral contributions to a society that has been oppressed for years.”
She also denied membership in opposition groups, adding, “So whoever spends time [in Syria’s Kurdish-majority region] is a member of PKK?”
Simiyari, the protester, was accused of taking part in the antiestablishment protests in 2022. She was arrested in May 2023. She has said she was tortured in prison and held in solitary confinement for prolonged periods.
‘Silencing Dissent’
Human rights groups have condemned what they have called trumped-up charges against the four women.
Iranian activists say the charge of armed rebellion against the state is often used by the authorities against political prisoners and dissidents.
“Faced with a women’s movement in Iran that refuses to back down, Islamic Republic authorities are now trying to threaten these women with the gallows, in a desperate attempt to silence dissent,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
Rights groups have repeatedly accused Iran of using the death penalty to instill fear in society in the wake of the 2022 protests.
Saeid Dehghan, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, said the four women have been charged with armed rebellion even though “they did not possess any weapons, and no weapons have been seized or recorded in their case.”
“The activities of these citizens were civil in nature and had no connection to a rebellion against the ‘foundation of the Islamic republic,’ let alone being armed to justify the charge of rebellion,” he said.
Activists fear the four women could be the next victims of Iran’s surge in executions.
At least 345 people have been executed so far this year, according to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.
CHRI said the fact that two of the women are Kurds reflected the “Islamic republic’s continued disproportionate use of the death penalty against the country’s minorities.”
Iran’s Kurdistan region was the scene of some of the most violent crackdowns during the 2022 protests.
In recent years, Tehran has upped the ante in its efforts to go after exiled opposition Iranian-Kurdish groups that it considers to be terrorist organizations.
