Child bride spared execution in Iran after blood money is paid
Guardian story helped to draw attention to planned hanging of Goli Kouhkan over death of abusive husband
A child bride who was due to be executed this month in Iran over the death of her husband has had her life spared by his parents, who were paid the equivalent of £70,000 in exchange for their forgiveness.
Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. At the age of 18 she was arrested over allegedly participating in the killing of her abusive husband, Alireza Abil, in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind.
Mai Sato, UN special rapporteur on the situation for human rights in Iran, said: “It’s great that Kouhkan won’t be executed – one life has been saved … but it doesn’t really solve the issue of the qisas law, which is in violation of many international standards.” Sato, along with three other UN experts, said earlier this month that the case “exemplifies the systemic gender bias faced by women victims of child marriage and domestic violence within Iran’s criminal justice system”.
In November, the Guardian was the first international publication to reveal that Kouhkan, an undocumented member of Iran’s Baluch minority, would face execution by hanging unless she could raise 10bn tomans (about £80,000) to pay off the victim’s family. Under Iranian law, a victim’s family can pardon someone in return for blood money – compensation payable in cases of murder or bodily harm.
In a statement issued last month, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, said: “The blood-money amount set for her case is several times the official rate, an impossible sum for a young, undocumented Baluch woman from a deprived background who has also been rejected by her family.”
