Sunday, April 21, 2019

NEWS))))))



Amnesty International issued a statement urging the Iranian regime to stop harassing, arresting and imprisoning women’s rights defenders peaceful protest against Iran’s degrading and discriminatory forced veiling laws. Following decrees for the re-arrest of civil activists, Yasamin Ariani and her mother, Monireh Arab-Shahi, and another decree to sentence a compulsory veil protester, Vida Movahedi, to one year in jail, Amnesty International called for immediate and unconditional release of these jailed women’s rights activists. Vida Movahedi a young mother has been in jail since mid-fall of 2018.

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The Iranian regime’s parliament voted down a proposal to allocate a one-sixth quota of parliamentary seats to women by a vote of 110 to 79 on Tuesday, April 16.
Parvaneh Mafi, a female member of the regime’s parliament, said, “As far as the number of parliamentary seats allocated to women is concerned, Iran ranks 180 among 191 countries in the world. Only Nigeria, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Maldives, Kuwait, Haiti, Oman, Yemen and Guinea are rank lower.”
To justify his opposition to election quotas for women, Moussavi Laregani, a member of the regime’s parliament, deceptively stated, “In the eighth term of the parliament, we had 9 women MPs, and in the ninth term, we had eight… Why should we make an exception and say one-sixth? I believe we should not make any exceptions.” (The state-run ICANA news agency- April 17, 2019)
Another MP, Shahab Naderi, stated that setting a quota for women would be against Article 9 of Principle 3 of the Constitution against discrimination. He added, “Gender discrimination and setting quotas would be a great injustice to women.”

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Sadaf Khadem, the first female Iranian boxer who won an overseas fight, intends to stay in France, where she fought last weekend. Khadem and her trainer, Mahyar Monshipour, are in Poitiers and had been expected to return to Tehran after the win over Anne Chauvin. The 24-year-old, who works as a fitness trainer in Tehran, had defied Iranian reime’s rule that female athletes should dress in line with Islamic laws. Khadem was bare-headed and wore shorts for the bout in Royan.