Thank you very much.
I think you are pointing to one of the most important issues in Iran's human rights scene, both in terms of the abuse and in terms of the struggle against the abuse.
One of the first laws of the ancien régime that Ayatollah Khomeini overturned was the family protection law. The Shah's regime had tried to make some changes, some reforms, in the family protection law to afford women more rights. The clergy were opposed to this when it was being discussed in 1970, and one of Ayatollah Khomeini's first gestures was to declare that null and void.
What that meant was that from then on, Islamic law would be applied to women, which meant that women would be denied judgeships. Shirin Ebadi, whose daughter is a guest in your country, the Nobel Prize laureate and the first Iranian woman judge, was immediately removed from her seat, as were other judges like her.
The right of divorce was completely given to men. Men were allowed to have four wives; they were allowed to have an infinite number of concubines; custody was now completely, more or less, in favour of men. A girl under the age of seven and a boy under the age of two stayed with the mother, and after that they went to the father or the father's family. In Islamic law, the father's family has more rights to a child than the mother does.
The custody laws, as well as inheritance laws and laws about community property, were completely scuttled. There was no community property. There was no payment of money. The only money a woman would get upon divorce would be what was written in the contractual agreement at the time of marriage.
Women did not take this lightly. They began to fight and push back. The age of marriage was brought down to nine for girls. Girls were allowed to marry at the age of nine, but as I said, women's organizations began to push back. They began to fight. Even some women within the regime realized that these laws were really unacceptable for the 20th and 21st centuries. They too began to fight back and push back. Some of those initial and most egregious laws were reformed--for example, the age of marriage is now back up to 14 for girls--but structural inequalities exist in the law.
I think women have been the most relentless fighters for human rights and for equal rights in the last 30 years of history. When the history of Iranian democracy and the Iranian human rights movement is written, I think we will realize and conclude that women were the most relentless champions. It was, to a great extent, the women's social networks created in the campaign for a million signatures that were used by the democratic opposition during the election to organize those massive, incredibly well-organized demonstrations, when three million came out. Some of the most important social networks, the computer networks, were used and developed earlier by the campaign for equal rights for women.
I think women are a remarkable measure of where Iranian society stands. The regime and its stalwarts are trying to push back and are trying to implement as many laws as possible. These laws--the right of the man to have four wives and an infinite number of concubines, the right of the man to divorce a woman at will, and many, many others--might have been progressive for their time 1,400 years ago in Arabia, but they're not progressive today.
We can spend a whole session talking about this. But women are not taking it and are struggling against it. I think they deserve much, much more credit for resisting the abuses, the systematic abuses of human rights, by this regime.