The Iranian Judiciary has called for the Provision of Security for Women Against Violence (PSW) bill to be fundamentally revised, expressing doubts over whether the heavy punishments stipulated in the bill for violations of women’s rights may actually weaken the family structure, i.e. putting a husband in jail for beating his wife.

Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Eje’ii, first deputy minister and spokesman of the Judiciary, said: “The objective of adopting this bill is to fortify the family environment so that women, spouses and others, would feel secure in every respect. Now, the question is whether the articles contained in the PSW bill provide such security or not.”

He argued that Iran’s general policy is “de-imprisonment”, which begs the question why Iranian prisons are between three and four times capacity, and that the bill advocates imprisonment as a punishment for every “minor violation”, a phrase that should be translated to every act of violence against women.

Eje’ii said: The PSW bill contained numerous problems so much that it could not be reformed. The solution is to draft a totally different bill or to reform the existing bill only in collaboration with the government.”

This ridiculous notion was echoed by the Judiciary’s cultural deputy, Hadi Sadeqi, who argued that it was impossible for the PSW bill to support women if it sent their husbands to jail and described the act of imprisoning domestic abusers as “the greatest blow to women and families”.

He said: “When a woman sends her husband to jail, then that man can never be a husband for her again, and the woman must accept the risk of getting divorced in advance.”

This shows, as if we needed it confirmed, that the Iranian Judiciary and the Regime as a whole do not take violence against women seriously, especially when a husband commits that violence.

It also shows that the Regime has no idea about the destructive impact that domestic violence has on a woman or the family as a whole. Indeed, if the mullahs were to look at the root cause of most of the cases of female death-row inmates, suicides, and runaways, as well as the increasing divorce rates, they would find that the majority are linked to domestic violence.

The Regime has been blocking the PSW bill for 13 years, not because they have a policy of de-imprisonment, but because they don’t care about women. That’s why they arrest women protesting the forced hijab and refuse to increase the age of marriage for girls to 15, which would still be terrifyingly young.