Iran violates human rights under banner of religion: Young people respond with ‘white marriage’

Eslam Mohamed

Although the Iranian authorities constantly rant with religious terms and extremist slogans, the reality inside the country does not correspond religiously and socially with that language of discourse, as the authorities have long since stopped applying religious rulings in the field of justice to a large extent.

White marriage

Recently, Iranian media attention focused on the issue of the penalty for adultery, after the Supreme Court in Tehran sentenced a man and a woman accused of it to death, which has not happened for a long time, but the court changed the way the sentence was executed from stoning to hanging.

This is a rare event, as the hudud (legal limits) have not been applied at all for many years, especially in such cases, despite the wide spread of sexual relations outside marriage among young people who seek to get rid of the state’s authority over them by any means and resort to living together without marriage, in what is called white marriage.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said in previous statements that the phenomenon of white marriage is an imperialist scheme that seeks to destroy his country and eliminate the family in it by spreading this phenomenon among young Iranian men and women.

Human rights violations

Although Iran has stopped religious sanctions, it has not refrained from practicing human rights violations on a large scale. According to Amnesty International, Iran remains among the world’s countries with the most executions, as it carried out 246 sentences in this regard in 2020. Amnesty’s annual report on executions around the world stated that the Iranian regime is solely responsible for half of the executions that were carried out globally last year, and that Iran is the only country witnessing the phenomenon of child executions. According to the report, at least three people executed in Iran in the year 2020 alone were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.

It is noteworthy that the last ruling came on the basis of the complaint of the wife of a convicted man at the beginning of this year, when she presented to the police video tapes proving the existence of a relationship between her husband and another woman. Although she forgave her husband and his lover, the father of the lover’s husband filed another lawsuit and demanded the most severe penalties, and the judges sentenced the defendants to death for adultery, based on the evidence in the case file. But the defendants appealed the verdict, and on appeal, the case was heard again in the Supreme Court. After reviewing the case, the higher judges upheld the death sentence according to the documents, videos, and the defendants’ confession.