Execution of Marziyeh Niri, Victim of Child Marriage, as Domestic Violence Ends in Death

Marziyeh Niri, a 24-year-old woman who, according to human rights reports, was married at age 17 under family pressure, was executed on charges of killing her husband after years of living in violent conditions. She was executed by qisas (retaliatory justice) in Qazvin Central Prison. Her case once again draws attention to the connection between child marriage, domestic violence, and women’s executions in Iran.

The execution of Marziyeh Niri, a 24-year-old victim of child marriage and forced marriage, was carried out early Saturday morning, August 17, 2025 (August 8 in the Gregorian calendar), at Qazvin Central Prison, known as “Chobin Dar” prison. As of the time of this report’s preparation, the execution has not been announced by the Islamic Republic’s official media or sources affiliated with the judiciary.

According to reports published previously, Marziyeh Niri, when she was only 18 years old in early September 2021, defended herself with a kitchen knife during a confrontation with her husband and one of his friends who, according to informed sources, intended to assault her. During this altercation, her husband was killed. Marziyeh fled for four days following the incident and sought refuge at her brother’s house, but her brother handed her over to the security police.

Iran Human Rights Organization reported that Marziyeh Niri, a resident of a village between Qazvin and Karaj, had been forced into marriage with a man named Davoud approximately six years earlier, when she was only 17 years old, under family pressure. According to the organization’s information, her husband’s house had become a gathering place for his friends and a site for drug and alcohol consumption, and her husband showed no reaction to the harassment and attempts by his friends to assault Marziyeh.

As a result, Marziyeh’s case cannot be viewed simply as that of a woman accused of “intentional homicide.” The account provided by human rights sources about her life depicts a woman who, from adolescence, entered into forced marriage, lived in an environment marked by violence and substance abuse, and ultimately, following a fatal confrontation, was sentenced to death.

Marziyeh Niri’s case did not occur in a vacuum. Statistics from the United Nations and UNICEF show that child marriage remains a social reality in Iran.

According to UNICEF data, approximately 17 percent of women aged 20 to 24 in Iran were married before reaching age 18 and entered into conjugal life. United Nations data also records this same figure for the indicator of marriage before age 18 in Iran.

The civil law of the Islamic Republic also does not completely prohibit marriage of girls at young ages. Human Rights Watch reported that under this law, girls can marry from age 13, and even at younger ages marriage is possible with a judge’s permission.

This situation means that girls who are still psychologically, physically, and economically in the position of a child may enter into a relationship from which it is extremely difficult to exit, especially when combined with poverty, family pressure, economic dependence, and the absence of effective legal protection for victims of domestic violence.

UNICEF also considers child marriage a harmful practice that violates children’s rights, endangers their health and well-being, and is connected to gender inequality and the disempowerment of girls.

One of the most important aspects of Marziyeh Niri’s case is the very issue that human rights organizations have repeatedly warned about: “Some of the women who are executed in Iran for killing their husbands were themselves victims of domestic violence before committing the crime.”

The Iran Human Rights Organization, in reviewing women’s executions in 2024, stated that many of the women executed were victims of domestic violence, child marriage, or severe economic and social deprivation. The organization documented at least 31 women’s executions that year, with 19 cases involving qisas sentences in murder cases. At least two executed women were child brides, and nine women were executed for killing their husbands.

The situation in 2025 became even more dire. The Iran Human Rights Organization announced that at least 48 women were executed in Iran that year, the highest figure recorded in more than two decades of systematic documentation of women’s executions. Of this number, 32 women were executed under qisas sentences in murder cases, and at least 21 women were hanged for killing their husbands or fiancés. At least two of the executed women were child brides.

These statistics are not merely dry figures in a human rights report; behind each case lies the life of a woman, many of whom spent years struggling with violence, forced marriage, poverty, or lack of legal protection before being lined up for execution.

In December 2025, Rana Faragh-Aghli, a 24-year-old woman from Tabriz, was also executed for allegedly killing her husband. The Iran Human Rights Organization reported that Rana was married at age 16, under family pressure, to a man 19 years her senior, and her family locked her in a room for two days to force her to accept the marriage.

An informed source regarding her situation said that Rana’s years of life after marriage, in her own words, were “like death.” She was ultimately sentenced to qisas and executed in Tabriz Central Prison for killing her husband.

In another case, Goli Kouhkan, a 25-year-old Baloch woman, was forced into marriage with her cousin at age 12 and endured years of physical and psychological violence. After an incident that resulted in her husband’s death, she faced a qisas sentence. UN experts in 2025 explicitly considered her case an example of “systemic gender discrimination against women victims of child marriage and domestic violence” and called on the Islamic Republic to halt her execution.

Goli Kouhkan ultimately escaped execution through the collection of diya (blood money) and the pardon of the victim’s family. However, this very fact demonstrates one of the structural problems of the qisas punishment system in Iran. The fate of a woman sentenced to death can largely depend on the ability of her family or supporters to gather the diya amount and secure the pardon of the victim’s family.

Human Rights Watch emphasized in its annual report on Iran that Iran’s laws still do not adequately criminalize domestic violence and marital rape, and the government has failed to provide effective protection for women against gender-based and domestic violence. The same report states that child marriage remains legal in Iran, and approximately 17 percent of girls marry before age 18.

This legal vacuum becomes even more significant when a woman is trapped in a violent marriage. If a woman cannot effectively and safely exit a violent relationship and there is insufficient legal protection to safeguard her, the possibility that a domestic dispute will escalate into a fatal incident increases.

In such circumstances, critics of Iran’s judicial system argue that focusing solely on the moment the killing occurred, without examining the history of violence and the circumstances that led the woman to that point, can victimize the victim again—once during married life and again during the judicial process.

Marziyeh Niri’s execution also occurred at a time when the number of executed women in Iran has shown significant growth in recent years. The Iran Human Rights Organization announced in July 2026 that with the execution of Parvin Chardouli, the number of women executed in Iran since 2010 has reached at least 300. The organization announced that the Islamic Republic has the highest documented number of women’s executions in the world. In 2025, at least 48 women were executed, and by the time that report was published in 2026, at least 11 more women had been executed.

At the same time, a significant portion of these executions are not announced by official media. In 2025, according to the Iran Human Rights Organization’s report, only four of the 48 women’s executions were announced by official sources.

This means the actual figures are likely higher than the numbers human rights organizations are able to document and verify.

In 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized the alarming increase in executions in Iran and emphasized the absence of fair trial procedures in a number of cases. The United Nations has also expressed concern about executions being carried out without informing the prisoner’s family or lawyer in some instances.

In murder cases, the Islamic Republic’s judicial system employs the qisas mechanism, a system in which the victim’s family can choose between implementing qisas, receiving diya, or granting pardon.

The Iran Human Rights Organization believes that one of the fundamental problems with this system is that the law does not sufficiently differentiate between various types of “intentional homicide” in terms of circumstances and degree of responsibility, and in many cases, underlying factors such as domestic violence, women’s social and economic status do not play a role proportionate to their importance in the final judgment.

For this reason, cases such as Marziyeh Niri raise this serious question: “If a woman has been trapped for years in a forced and violent marriage, should justice only begin from the moment blood is shed?”

The answer to this question is not merely a legal debate; it is a human issue that concerns the fate of girls who may enter into marriage and conjugal life in childhood, choices they did not make themselves, and who, as adults, may face the most severe possible punishment if they react to violence.

Marziyeh Niri’s case confronts this painful contradiction: a girl who, according to human rights reports, was married at age 17 under family pressure; a woman who, according to the same reports, faced violence and the threat of assault in her home; and ultimately, at age 24, after being sentenced to qisas, was executed.

Her death occurred even as news of the execution’s implementation, as of the time this report was prepared, was not reflected in the Islamic Republic’s official media.

Marziyeh Niri is now one of dozens of names to be recorded in the statistics of women’s executions in Iran, but behind this number lies the story of a girl whose childhood ended with forced marriage, whose brother handed her to the security police, and whose life ultimately ended at the gallows. Her case once again demonstrates that for many women in Iran, domestic violence, child marriage, lack of family support, lack of legal protection, and capital punishment can be links in a single chain.