Intersecting Discrimination Against Bahá’í Women in Iran

Maral Hamzehloo

The concept of gender apartheid is gaining recognition in international legal discourse as a framework for analysing state-enforced systems that segregate, subordinate, and exclude individuals on the basis of gender. It refers not merely to isolated acts of discrimination but to a legally codified order that systematically limits women’s participation in public life. Although this framework is often applied to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s treatment of women in general, the experience of Bahá’í women demonstrates how gender apartheid intersects with religious persecution to produce compounded harm.

Intersecting Marginalization

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian authorities have subjected the country’s roughly 300,000 Bahá’ís to policies of exclusion from universities, public employment, and property ownership. Human rights researchers describe these measures as a form of “cultural apartheid” intended to erase Bahá’í identity from public life. According to the Bahá’í International Community, arrests, home raids, and confiscations have continued into 2024, with women frequently singled out for intimidation.

For Bahá’í women, these religion-based abuses converge with Iran’s broader gender-based restrictions. Like all Iranian women, they are bound by compulsory hijab laws, face the absence of comprehensive domestic-violence legislation (Human Rights Watch), and live under a legal code that permits fathers or grandfathers to receive reduced sentences for killing daughters or granddaughters under Article 301 of the Islamic Penal Code. Their Bahá’í identity compounds these constraints: they are excluded from higher education altogether, denied state protection, and targeted by security forces in periods of political tension.

Historical and Contemporary Evidence

The execution of Mona Mahmudnizhad and nine other Bahá’í women in Shiraz in 1983 remains one of the most emblematic instances of intersecting persecution. They were hanged for refusing to renounce their faith, an act simultaneously gendered and religiously charged. Today, Bahá’í women continue to be arrested or barred from education and work. In 202, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran condemned renewed raids on Bahá’í homes and warned that women were particularly vulnerable to harassment and threats of sexual violence during detention.

This pattern fits squarely within the emerging legal definition of gender apartheid. The state enforces gender as a legal category through mandatory dress codes, unequal family laws, and restrictions on cultural expression while simultaneously persecuting Bahá’ís on the basis of religion. Bahá’í women, therefore, experience compound subordination: their gender exposes them to the systemic exclusion faced by all Iranian women, and their faith places them under continuous surveillance and collective punishment.

Implications for International Law

Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees freedom of religion and equality before the law, yet it consistently violates both. The current debate over including gender apartheid as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute offers an opportunity to recognise how the Iranian state weaponizes law to entrench both religious and gender hierarchies.

Such recognition would give advocates and United Nations bodies a stronger legal basis to hold Iranian authorities accountable and to affirm that excluding Bahá’í women on the grounds of both gender and religion constitutes a crime under international law.