In early December 2025, Iran’s penal apparatus claimed another victim: Rana Faraj‑oghli, a woman forcibly married as a child, was executed in Tabriz Central Prison — not because the system is broken, but because it is functioning exactly as designed. At the same time, the near execution of Goli Kouhkan — a 25-year-old Baluch woman sentenced under the same brutal logic — underscores how that machinery relentlessly produces tragedies week after week.
This blog post details why these events are not isolated horror stories, but structural outcomes of a legal-judicial system tailored to oppress women, especially child brides, ethnic minorities, and the impoverished.
The Execution of Rana Faraj-Oghli: A Case Study in Structural Injustice
According to a report by the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights (Hengaw), Rana Faraj-oghli — identified as a forced-child-marriage victim — was executed at dawn on December 3, 2025.
Faraj-oghli was married at 16, to a man nineteen years her senior. She later testified that years of “a life that felt no different from death” had left her traumatized. In court she said she did not even want a lawyer; her only request was “to be freed” from that living hell.
Her execution went unacknowledged by Iranian state media — a pattern noted by human-rights observers.
Her death is not an anomaly. According to data from Hengaw and the Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO), 2024 saw the highest number of female executions in more than 15 years.
But rather than reflecting “glitches,” the far greater conclusion is that such outcomes are baked into the system’s design.
The Scale of the Crisis: Execution Statistics Expose a Factory, Not a Mistake
Hengaw’s 2025 reports show that Iran has carried out more than 1,100 executions so far this year.
In 2024 alone, 909 people were executed — a 9.5% increase from 2023.
Among those executed in 2024 were at least 30 women.
Of those executed for murder charges under the principle of “qisas” (retribution-in-kind), 419 were carried out in 2024 — the highest yearly total since 2010.
According to IHRNGO, of those executed for murder in 2024, 19 were women, representing 61% of all female executions that year.
These numbers paint a harrowing picture: this is no aberration or short-term spike. The execution apparatus is accelerating — and women are increasingly its targets.
Most alarmingly, many of the women executed appear to be victims of domestic violence, child or forced marriage, or other forms of structural subjugation — yet the courts fail to treat these mitigating circumstances as anything but irrelevant.
Goli Kouhkan: The Next in Line — And the System Exposed
While Faraj-oghli’s execution was carried out, another case nearly reached the same tragic outcome. Goli Kouhkan was, until December 2025, scheduled for execution — set to be hanged under qisas — unless she paid roughly 10 billion tomans (≈ €100,000 / ~$90,000) in so-called “blood money” (diya) to her late husband’s family.
Goli had been forced into marriage at age 12, delivered a child at 13 without medical care, and endured years of physical and psychological abuse.
In May 2018, after years of abuse, during a violent confrontation in which her husband beat their 5-year-old son — she called a relative for help. A fight ensued; her husband died. She claims she tried to do right by calling an ambulance, but nonetheless was arrested and sentenced to death under qisas.
During interrogation, she was denied a lawyer, illiterate at the time, and pressured into signing a “confession” she could not fully understand.
According to IHRNGO, the amount demanded for the blood money was several times higher than the official rate — effectively making it impossible for a poor, undocumented woman to save her life.
Crucially, Goli’s ordeal illustrates systemic intersections — child marriage, ethnic discrimination (she is Baluch, undocumented), poverty, domestic violence, and a justice system that doesn’t recognize or value her suffering or even her very right to life the way others might.
On 9 December 2025, she was ultimately spared execution — the victim’s family accepted a reduced diya after donations and charity funds reportedly raised the sum.
But Goli’s “survival” should not offer comfort — it starkly demonstrates how close her life came to termination, and that the only thing that saved her was a near impossible fundraising effort.
Why This Isn’t Random — It’s Systemic by Design
The tragic fates of Rana Faraj-oghli and Goli Kouhkan are not random aberrations. They are the intended result of a legal and social architecture built on:
Child and forced marriage laws: In Iran, girls can legally be married at age 13; younger children may be married with approval from a male guardian and a judge.
Lack of legal protections against domestic violence: Women have limited access to divorce, no effective legal framework safeguarding them from physical or sexual abuse within marriage, and may have no realistic escape route.
The qisas system of “retribution-in-kind”: Under qisas laws, murder — even in self-defense or after years of abuse — is often punished with death unless “blood money” (diya) is paid — an amount arbitrarily set and often very high.
Lack of fair trial standards: Cases such as Goli’s, where defendants are illiterate, denied counsel, coerced into confessions, are common. Courts often ignore the context of sustained abuse, ethnic background, illiteracy, and powerlessness.
Economic and social marginalization: Many women facing execution are from ethnic minorities (e.g., Baluch, Kurdish), undocumented, poor — their vulnerabilities magnified by discrimination.
This structure — not exceptional cruelty — is operative. Every time a child bride is forced into marriage, suffers abuse, kills her abuser in desperation, is denied legal representation, fails to pay arbitrary blood money, and is executed — that is the conveyor belt working exactly as intended.
2025: Death Toll Rising, Women Pay the Heaviest Price
The trends are alarming and getting worse:
By December 2025, more than 1,426 executions had been recorded during the first 11 months of the year — a 70% increase compared to the same period in 2024.
Among those executed were 41 women in 2025 alone, according to IHRNGO’s most recent monthly report.
Data from Hengaw’s November 2025 report shows at least 176 femicides plus systematic violations of women’s rights — pointing to a broader climate of gender-based violence and killings, only some of which lead to executions.
Most of the women executed for murder are believed to have killed their husband or intimate partner — many after years of forced marriage, child marriage, or domestic abuse.
In short: 2025 is shaping up to be the deadliest year for female executions in modern Iranian history.
What This Reveals About the Regime — And Why “Reform” Means Nothing
The sharp acceleration of executions under the administration of Masoud Pezeshkian — now 16 months in power — shatters any illusions about benign reform. Instead of dismantling the machinery of repression, the pace has only intensified. According to one report: 140 executions were recorded during just one month (May 22–June 21, 2025), five of them women.
That “reformist” leadership is overseeing the largest wave of executions in decades is not coincidental. It is telling.
This is not about botched justice or isolated excess; it is about a system built to control, punish, and suppress — especially women, minorities, and the vulnerable.
The only thing that can stop such a conveyor belt is not statements, not data, not more documentation: it is dismantlement.
The (Near-)Escape of Goli Kouhkan: A Victory — But For What?
On 9 December 2025, the judiciary announced that the victim’s family in Goli Kouhkan’s case had accepted payment in full, pardoning her from execution.
While this is—on the face of it—a relief, it must not obscure the reality:
Her life was contingent on raising a sum of money that, for someone of her background, was almost impossible to obtain.
The initial blood-money demand was exorbitant (≈ €100,000), far above any officially set scale — a de facto ransom exacted to preserve the death sentence’s structural force.
Her “reprieve” depended not on justice, but on charity and international attention. Not on reform, but on sympathy and luck.
The system remains intact, with her co-defendant (the cousin involved in the same incident) reportedly still on death row.
Ultimately, Goli’s story is not one of redemption — it is one of escape from a machine that continues to grind on hundreds more.
Conclusion: This Is Not an Abnormality — It Is the System
The execution of Rana Faraj-oghli and the attempted execution of Goli Kouhkan illustrate a brutal but functional architecture of suppression. This is not random brutality; this is the machinery of the state operating according to its laws, definitions, and priorities.
The statistics — rising year after year, increasing disproportionately against women, often child brides or domestic violence survivors — are not glitches. They are the expected output.
“Reformist” rhetoric notwithstanding, the regime has not dismantled this machinery — it has fine-tuned it. And the people who pay the highest price remain the most vulnerable: illiterate girls forced into childhood marriage; women battered by their husbands; ethnic minorities without legal status; the impoverished — those too vulnerable to pay demand-note blood money, too powerless to mount a proper legal defense.
Let this be a call for more than outrage. Enough with counting the bodies. The only thing that stops a conveyor belt of death is dismantling it.
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