Execution Scheduled for December Unless $90K Paid for Killing Abusive Husband

Denied Lawyer During Interrogation, Coerced into Confession Despite Illiteracy

Center for Human Rights in Iran

November 13, 2025 — At only 12 years old, Goli Kouhkan was forced into an abusive marriage. At 13, she gave birth to her son without any medical care. At 18, after years of suffering physical and sexual abuse, she was arrested for killing her abusive husband during a domestic dispute. Now, after seven years on death row, Kouhkan is scheduled to be executed in December unless she can pay an unattainable amount of “blood money” to her abuser 's family.

Kouhkan 's case is not an isolated one. In Iran, girls are legally married off at age 13 (younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge), girls and women lack legal protection against domestic violence that is severe and widespread, and women have extremely limited ability to divorce and thus escape abusive marriages. As a result, some are driven to kill their abusers as a last resort.

Yet the Islamic Republic 's judiciary refuses to recognize any mitigating circumstances in these cases—even including severe and sustained physical and sexual abuse—and sentences these women to death for murder.

“Girls are married off at age 13 or even younger, and subjected to decades of beatings and rape, with no real possibility of divorce or escape. Many are often killed by family members if they try. Courts must consider these circumstances as mitigating factors when sentencing,” said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).

“Kouhkan is the face of so many women in Iran—robbed of her entire childhood, subjected to years of abuse—and now, at age 25, facing the death penalty for trying to escape the very abuse that the state failed to protect her from,” said Ghandehari.

“Indeed, the Iranian regime is deeply complicit in these killings because it does not take even the most basic measures to end child marriage or to protect girls and women from domestic abuse—situations that all too often end in death, although it is usually that of the woman,” Ghandehari added.

CHRI urgently calls on the international community to demand that Iran:

• Not carry out the scheduled December 2025 execution of Goli Kouhkan;
• Halts all other executions for killings committed in the context of domestic abuse;
• Initiates contextual judicial considerations for these cases that will allow trapped, serially abused women to avoid the death penalty.

In addition, CHRI calls on the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Special Rapporteurs on Iran and on Violence Against Women and Girls, UNICEF, international legal associations, and governments worldwide to call upon the Iranian authorities to:

• Raise the legal age of marriage to international norms.
• Address the severe domestic abuse crisis in Iran by:
  • Fully investigating all reports of ill-treatment of women;
  • Allocating resources for urgently needed intervention mechanisms, including orders of protection and safe houses;
  • Prosecuting and punishing perpetrators of domestic violence, instead of turning a blind eye to “family matters.”
• Enact judicial reforms so that women—including those of lesser means—do not continue to face insurmountable obstacles when trying to obtain a divorce.

The Case: “Every attempt to leave had been unsuccessful.”

Born in April 2000 in Golestan Province, Goli Kouhkan, a 25-year-old undocumented Baloch woman, was arrested in May 2018 and sentenced to death on charges of qisas (retribution-in-kind) for participation in the killing of her husband alongside her cousin Mohammad Abil, who was also sentenced to death. She has been held in Gorgan Central Prison and is scheduled to be executed in December.

On the day her husband was killed, Kouhkan saw him beating their five-year-old son and called her cousin for help. A confrontation ensued when he arrived, leading to her husband 's unintentional death. Kouhkan then contacted emergency services and reported the incident to authorities. Both she and her cousin were subsequently arrested.

Faezeh Abdipour, a former political prisoner who was the cellmate of Kouhkan, told CHRI that Kouhkan was forced to marry her cousin and suffered constant physical and psychological violence. During the final altercation when her husband was killed, although evidence suggested her cousin was the main perpetrator, Kouhkan took full blame, and both received death sentences.

In August 2025, her husband 's family agreed to pardon her on two conditions: that 10 billion tomans (approximately USD 90,000) in blood money be paid to the family and that she permanently leave the city of Gorgan. Under Iranian law, in cases of qisas, the victim 's family can choose between death as retribution, diya(blood money or compensation), or forgiveness.

An informed source told IHRNGO:

“Goli was 12 when she was forced to marry her cousin. A year later, she gave birth to a son at home without medical care. While pregnant, she was forced to do heavy farm and housework and consistently subjected to physical violence at the hands of her husband, who also cut her contact with her family and friends. Every attempt to leave had been unsuccessful due to both her undocumented status and societal factors. Once, when she escaped to her parent 's home, her father told her: ‘I gave my daughter away in a white dress, you will return in a shroud. '”

After her arrest, Kouhkan was denied access to a lawyer during interrogation and, despite being illiterate and unaware of her legal rights, she was pressured into signing a “confession.” This coerced “confession” was used as evidence to sentence her to death, without the court taking into account the circumstances surrounding the killing, including the years of severe physical and sexual violence.

Abdipour told CHRI that in prison, Kouhkan began learning to read and write, as well as carpet weaving, leatherwork, and marquetry, earning recognition as a model inmate with no record of misconduct or addiction. She has been barred from seeing her 11-year-old son, named Yousef, who remains in the custody of her husband 's family.

Like many Baluch ethnic minorities in Iran who are denied official identification documents by the state, Kouhkan is undocumented. As such, she lacks access to state services (including medical care), education (her illiteracy contributed to her vulnerability to forced confessions and other due process rights), and legal protections (such as filing a complaint or accessing a lawyer). Kouhkan 's undocumented status and ethnic marginalization thus add an important layer of vulnerability to her abuse and the state 's neglect.

A woman lawyer in Iran talked to CHRI about qisas cases:

“The lives of those sentenced to qisas are placed in the hands of the victim 's family — ordinary people, whose opinions on execution may differ. Some are minors, while others are so elderly that they are incapable of making decisions, and both groups require legal guardians, a process that takes a long time.

“In many cases, the victim 's family demands diyah (blood money), but the convicted cannot pay and remains in prison for years. In Mashhad prison, there was a woman named Bibi Kiani who was sentenced to qisas for killing her husband. She had neither family nor money. When I saw her about four years ago, she was serving her eleventh year in prison. The victim 's daughters wanted money, which she didn 't have. She had lived eleven years under the shadow of execution, repeatedly asking to be executed, and had attempted suicide multiple times, for which she was punished with solitary confinement. She endured prolonged torture and imprisonment while waiting every day for her sentence to be carried out.

“In such cases, the defendants endure not only the death sentence but also imprisonment as an additional punishment.

“Another form of torture imposed on those sentenced to qisas is that they are repeatedly prepared for execution. The formalities are carried out, the noose is placed around their neck, and then they are given a chance to provide diyah. This ritual is usually performed to intimidate the defendant 's relatives, but the individual is brought to the brink of death.

“One of the most inhumane rulings is sentencing someone to qisas through qassameh. Meaning if someone is suspected of murder but there is no conclusive evidence, fifty male paternal relatives of the accused swear that he or she is the killer, and a qisas sentence is issued.”

The Crisis of Child Marriage in Iran and the State 's Failure

Widespread child marriage that continues to be legally sanctioned by the state has contributed to the growing and intricately linked crises of abusive marriages, rampant domestic violence, and fatal outcomes in Iran.

Girls can be married at age 13 in Iran, and younger with the permission of the father or male guardian and a judge. The National Statistical Center of Iran stopped publishing information on child marriages, obscuring the ongoing crisis. Still, the latest available data shows that between the winter of 2021 and 2022, at least 27,448 registered marriages of girls under the age of 15 were recorded, along with 1,085 cases of childbirth within this age group. The true number of child marriages in Iran is much higher, as so many are not registered.

Child marriage exposes girls to marital rape, domestic violence, exploitation, and serious health issues stemming from early childbearing. Young girls who try to escape are often victims of femicide and honor killings—which are punished extremely leniently in Iran, if at all, and as a result many child brides resort to suicide.

Zahra Rahimi, co-founder of the Imam Ali Popular Students Relief Society, an NGO in Iran focused on poverty reduction that was forcibly shuttered by Iranian authorities, previously told CHRI about the process of girls younger than 13 marrying:

“The judge will ask questions such as, ‘What is the price of meat? If you want to buy something for your home, what do you buy? ' and based on the girl 's answers, he will determine whether she is ready for marriage. In this process, there is no lawyer, psychologist, doctor, expert, or trusted person to talk to the child. …Where the court did not allow marriages to take place [for example, when the girls were under 9 years old], the girls were sent into ‘temporary marriages ' until they turned 13, and then their marriage would become legal.”

Rahimi added that for girls who do not have a birth certificate (often girls from marginalized communities), there are no accurate statistics. In many other cases, there is no court process or legal registration of marriage; families only recite a verse from the Quran to seal a marriage contract.

Iran 's Refusal to Address Its Endemic Domestic Violence Leads to Fatal Violence

State laws not only permit child marriage but also provide little to no protection for child brides or women trapped in abusive relationships, despite the severe and widespread domestic violence that has been documented in the country. The complete absence of risk-assessment and protective mechanisms for victims is a key factor leading to fatal outcomes.

The police typically dismiss reports of domestic violence—even life-threatening incidents—as a “family matter,” ignoring cases of severe abuse and pressuring battered women to return to their homes. Given that Iranian law requires that a woman who leaves the marital home not only forfeits her right to maintenance but also loses custody of her children, women often do return to their abusers.

Standard judicial mechanisms such as orders of protection or restraining orders aimed at preventing contact between abusers and their victims—not only after they have been explicitly threatened by family members but also even after severe domestic violence has occurred—are not available in Iran.

In addition, there are grossly insufficient services for victims or women at risk. Shelters and safe houses are absent in much of the country—a situation exacerbated by the government 's closure of facilities that address violence against women and the state 's persecution of relevant independent NGOs and charitable organizations.

For example, the Mehre Shams Afarid NGO safe house, which supported vulnerable women and children in Orumiyeh, in Iran 's West Azerbaijan province, was closed, and previously, NGOs in Iran, such as the Imam Ali 's Popular Student Relief Society (IAPSRS), Khaneh Khorshid, and the Omid-e-Mehr Foundation, which also supported vulnerable women and children, were shut down. At the same time, activists advocating to protect vulnerable women and children are targeted by the state with bogus prosecutions. The Iranian government 's suppression of civil society has silenced independent voices advocating on social issues.

Indeed, women often do not have any practical recourse even in the face of repeated abuse, given the arduous burden of proof that a woman must meet to report physical abuse, the lack of specialized training by law enforcement in domestic abuse, and the penalties she will endure for leaving the home. In such a context, it is not surprising that many women without any reasonable legal recourse who are repeatedly abused and are clearly under the threat of lethal violence finally kill their husbands in a desperate act of self-defense.

In a December 2024 interview with CHRI, former political prisoner and human rights activist Atena Daemi recounted the stories of incarcerated women:

“​​I was a cellmate with these women [on death row for murdering their husbands] …99% of them were women who were forced to marry under the age of 18…. Most of these women endured continuous domestic violence as they went through childhood and adolescence and grew up. To escape this situation, they tried to get divorced, but they didn 't succeed… because they had children, getting a divorce became more difficult and they had to endure hardship for the sake of the children. But for many of them, tolerance became impossible, and at some point, and in the midst of a dispute, without any prior intention, they killed their husbands.”

A 2025 report by Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO) stated, “Many of the women executed for murder acted out of desperation in response to violence, rape or coercive control. About 70% of women sentenced to death for murder are charged with murdering their male partner. Trapped in abusive marriages, they were often driven to acts of self-defense. Yet Iran 's legal system rarely acknowledges such mitigating circumstances. Women 's testimonies are worth half of men 's, and laws fail to recognise domestic violence or marital rape, leaving these women defenseless in court.”

A broad academic analysis undertaken in 2021 of dozens of scholarly articles from 2000 to 2014 on domestic violence against women in Iran estimated its prevalence at 66 percent. The meta-analysis concluded, “After all [this abuse of women], there are no laws against domestic violence, despite all the damage it costs. All these efforts have come to an unlegislated bill, which has been reduced to a financial penalty.”

According to a study presented at a conference in Tehran hosted by the Imam Ali Foundation (now-shuttered by the Iranian authorities) on “Violence Against Women in Peripheral Families” in 2017, 32 percent of Iranian women in urban areas and 63 percent in rural areas experienced domestic violence. Other Iranian academic studies have indicated the rate is much higher. In any event, there is significant under-reporting, as domestic violence is typically suffered in silence, in a judicial context that provides no redress or support to women.

This unaddressed domestic violence in Iran is encouraged by laws that require women to obey their husbands and a judicial system that refuses to punish domestic violence. The Lancet medical journal reported a shocking 8,000 “honor killings” across Iran between 2010 and 2014.

Inability to Obtain Divorce Adds to Abused Women 's Desperation

The Islamic Republic 's law allows men to unilaterally divorce their wives, even verbally.

Yet it is extraordinarily difficult for women to seek divorce, with onerous conditions that are often impossible to meet and are at the discretion of the deciding judge, and which result in the woman losing financial maintenance and child custody. For women of lesser means, it is effectively impossible to successfully seek a divorce.

These killings are thus happening in contexts where women are permanently trapped in deeply abusive—even lethally dangerous—marriages.

Many Cases Go Unheard Amid Lack of Coverage

The Islamic Republic of Iran executes more women than any other country in the world. So far in 2025, at least 39 women have been executed. In 2024, at least 975 people were executed, including 31 women; however, authorities announced only 10% of these recorded executions.

A journalist in Iran told CHRI that gaining access to such cases, especially in small or marginalized towns, is extremely difficult.

“Most of these cases occur in impoverished, rural communities. It 's certain that the number of women who were victims of child marriage and later sentenced to death is far higher than what gets reported. You rarely see such cases covered in official or local media, and even then, judicial officials almost never comment.”

In recent years, only a few cases involving women executed after being forced into child marriage or forced marriages have become public, as state authorities rarely announce executions.

Akhtar Ghorbanlou, a young woman who, at the age of 17, was forcibly married to a man 18 years older than her, was later accused of killing her husband by poisoning him. Trapped in an abusive marriage, she did not have any legal protection and faced a judicial system that ignored her circumstances. Akhtar was sentenced to death for “premeditated murder,” and her execution was carried out in October 2024 in Ahar Prison, northwest Iran.

Roya Abbaszadeh, a 25-year-old woman, was hanged in Zanjan Central Prison on September 24, 2025, for killing her husband four years earlier after her family forced her to marry him.

Samira Sabzian Fard was forced into child marriage at the age of 15 and endured years of domestic violence. She was hanged in Ghezelhesar Prison on December 20, 2023. She was arrested ten years earlier and sentenced to qisas for the murder of her husband.

Iran: Multiple Violations of International Law

Goli Kouhkan 's forced marriage at the age of 12—and all of the many tens of thousands of other young girls who are forcibly married in the Islamic Republic—is a profound violation of Iran 's obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Even though Iran approved the CRC decades ago, it has not amended its laws accordingly, with the Islamic Republic 's refusal to revise its child marriage laws being one of the more egregious examples.

The Islamic Republic also does not meet its requirements and absolute obligations to take clear steps to prevent violence against women and punish violent abusers of women under other international conventions, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, Articles 3, 6, and 26) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, Articles 3 and 12).

In addition, Iran is one of only very few countries in the world that has not yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Its laws on divorce, as well as all other matters of personal status and family law in the Islamic Republic, are deeply discriminatory toward women. In the case of abused child brides and what happens as a result, the ramifications are often fatal to women.

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