Iranian activists pursue women’s rights despite crackdown

Iranian activist Nahid Keshavarz recently endured two weeks in jail, but she is not allowing it to stop her from trying to collect one million signatures for a women’s rights petition, Reuters reported on Sunday.

“No one wants to go to prison,” she said, “But if we have to pay a price then we will, like women have all over the world.”

Keshavarz is just one of the dozens of Iranian women who have been detained since 2006 as part of Tehran’s crackdown on dissent.

Though they recognize that there has been progress in areas such as access to higher education, Iranian women are actively campaigning in areas such as divorce, inheritance and employment rights, where institutionalized discrimination makes them “second-class citizens.”

“There seems to be no end in sight to the Iranian government's persecution of women’s rights activists,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

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