the basis of this code, violence against women is
encouraged, women’s right to life is denigrated, a
woman’s testimony in court is either not valued or
deemed as only half as credible as that of a man,
and some of her most basic human rights, such as
the right to wear what she wishes, are denied.
There are many instances of gender-based in-
equality that can be cited in the Islamic Penal Code
but at the most fundamental level inequitable treat-
ment is manifested in the minimum age of criminal
culpability. The Islamic Penal Code itself does not
specify the minimum age of criminal culpability
and instead in Article 49 identifies a child as some-
one who has not reached the age of religious matu-
rity. It is in Article 1210 of the Civil Code that the
age of religious maturity of 9 for women and 15 for
men is specified. As such, girls enter the arena of
criminal liability six years earlier than boys and can
be punished as adults. This contradicts the Con-
vention on the Rights of the Child, which has been
ratified and signed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Iranian judicial system has tried to lessen the
impact of the existing laws and in some ways to
offer a veneer of legitimacy to its practices by cre-
ating special corrective courts for children but the
realities of Article 49 of the Islamic Penal Code and
the unequal treatment it promotes on the basis of
gender cannot be overlooked.
Iranian criminal laws also treat men and women
differently in terms of the right to wear the kind of
attire they wish. Immediately after the 1979 Revo-
lution, not wearing a veil or not wearing it properly
in public was considered a crime, punishable by as
many as 74 lashes until 1996 when imprisonment
or monetary fines replaced lashes. The situation is
complicated by the fact while Article 638 of the
Islamic Penal Code passed in 1996 identifies the
new penalties, it continues to keep the category of
“improper” veil undefined, leaving it open to inter-
pretation by judges or implementers of the law who
have found the legal vagueness a useful tool for
harassing women.
There are many other areas in which men and
women face varied and unequal criminal culpabil-
ity, for instance in allowing for passion killing for
men but not women (Article 630 of the Islamic
Penal Code). The law also treats a woman’s life as
less worthy than a man’s by making her blood
money worth half that of a man’s. If a man inten-
tionally kills or maims a woman and in turn, based
on the law of retribution, is sentenced to death or
maiming, the woman’s family must give half of the
man’s blood money to his family. The law does not
require blood money for a woman who has been
pakistan 407sentenced to death or murder. Such disparity in
blood money compensation, and the fact that the
family of the female victim ends up owing money to
the family of the male criminal in its pursuit of jus-
tice, has the potential of promoting violence against
women for the sake of financial gain.
There are also areas in the Iranian criminal law,
such as sexual relations between unmarried adults
(zinà) or adultery (zinà-yi mu™ßina), both criminal-
ized in the Islamic Republic, in which the Islamic
Penal Code seemingly treats men and women
equally. But in practice women end up receiving
harsher punishments. For instance, in the case of
adultery, both the married man and the married
women caught in extra-marital relationships are
subject to the punishment of stoning on the basis
of Article 83 of the Islamic Penal Code. However,
more women have been stoned because, given the
fact that men in Iran have the right to marry up to
four wives, adulterous men have the option of iden-
tifying the woman with whom they have relations
as their new wife, an option obviously not open to
adulterous women. International pressures to end
this practice have only led to the suspension of
stoning by the judiciary and not its outright ban
through parliamentary laws.Bibliography
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raf≠-i tab≠ìz az zanàn bàqavànìn-i dàkhilì-i îràn,
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——,Sàkhtàr-i ™uqùqì-i niΩàm-i khàvàdah dar îràn,
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——,Pizhùhishìdarbàrah-±i khushùnat ≠alayh-i zanàn
dar îràn, Tehran 2000.
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F. Íàli™ì, Diya yàmujàzàt-i màlì, Tehran 1992.Mehrangiz KarPakistanSince 1947, the Pakistan Penal Code 1860, the
Criminal Procedure Code 1989, and the Evidence
Act of 1872 have formed the statutory basis of the
criminal law of Pakistan. In 1979 Islamic criminal
law was partly implemented. Islamic criminal law
is not compatible with the status that women
already had in Pakistan. Woman’s organizations
mobilized and claimed that Islamic law had to face
the challenges of the modern world. The women’s
movement in Pakistan holds that traditional
Islamic law needs reinterpretation and that religion
should not be confused with a patriarchal social