Women in Iran

Iran's government is sending women for counseling in an effort to enforce regulations requiring them to cover their hair. Healthcare organizations have warned that the country's judiciary is appropriating mental medicine for its own ends, but others have cited the action as evidence that the government is unable to uphold hijab rules, France 24 reported.

Be My Voice, a documentary about Iranian women's fight against the forced wearing of the hijab, has won the Amnesty International Slovenia Human Rights Film Award as the 25th Festival of Documentary Film in Ljubljana.

Short movies nominated for an Oscar often don't get wide public attention. But when one is about an Iranian girl seeking freedom from male domination by taking off her veil, interest is sure to spike.

Iranian police fired tear gas on Saturday to disperse a protest rally in the country's west following the funeral ceremony for a young woman who died while in police custody in Tehran earlier this week, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Iran's next revolution will be brought on by women taking back the freedoms denied to them in the Islamic republic, said Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of this year's Best Actress award at Cannes.

Britain’s foreign secretary phoned his Iranian counterpart on Nov. 7 to express "his anxiety over the continued suffering" of a British-Iranian woman being held in Iran and set out plans to visit Tehran to discuss the case.

Advocates of women's rights in Serbia said Gojkovic should not have donned the full-length abaya during her trip to Tehran on Monday, arguing that she had worn more conservative clothing than was necessary for diplomatic protocol in the Islamic republic.

Iran is to appoint a woman ambassador for the first time since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to unconfirmed media reports April 15.
      
The reports said foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham would be named ambassador to an Asian country.
      

Draft legislation aimed at boosting a flagging birth rate threatens to reduce Iranian women to "baby-making machines" and set their rights back by decades, Amnesty International warned on March 11.