Women’s resistance in Iran, and why it matters for women’s rights everywhere

We have an opportunity to stand behind Jîna Emînî and her family to demand the fair and non-discriminatory operation of politics in Iran, and, by extension, in all parts of the world merely by demanding their cohesion to internationally agreed human rights legislation. This high-profile event is just the spark that can catalyse an uprising against a truly criminal government.

"What we see right now happening in Iran is historic. A revolution led by women, beginning in Kurdistan, spreading across the nation in the face of torture and death. They stand for their equality and human rights," says Golriz Ghahraman, Member of Parliament for the NZ Greens and a human rights lawyer, in her appeal to UN and NZ government.

The government in Iran is a government that supports femicide and racism and Kurdish women are overrepresented in this cruel campaign.

"Rojhelati women [from Eastern Iranian Kurdista],"  Kurdish activist Raz Xaidan says, have "...picked up arms since 1940s" in resistance against successive discriminatory governments who saw Kurdish people as subordinate citizens. "Stop acting like this is the first time they've known resistance," Xaidan tweeted last Wednesday. So what happened to Jîna is a particularly nasty example of state-sanctioned racist and misogynist violence, which shows just how dangerous it is for these Kurdish women to be protesting in public in Tehran.

Iranian women from all walks of life have taken to the streets of Tehran to riot, and high-profile women, such as Bella Hadid and Golshifteh Farahani, have rallied behind the cause, but many world leaders have been disturbingly mealy-mouthed over the issue.

The USA has placed quiet sanctions on the "morality police" since the protests. The Iranian leader Ebrahim Raisi has since shut down the internet to many parts of Tehran and Iranian Kurdistan, despite saying the death of Jîna "must certainly be investigated". It is really important that we continue to sanction the government and police forces in Iran and bring them to the table at UN for their repeated atrocities against women and in particular Kurdish women.

"I still remember being a child in Iran and the terror that every woman felt… my mum, my aunts, having to check their dress again and again…now, Iranian women fight back and we must stand with them." Ghahraman says. And we must, with every fibre of our moral being, lest our own sisters, mothers and daughters and we suffer like these women in the slow slide from patriarchy to misogyny, which happens everywhere.