The struggle for a democratic Iran is no longer an abstract aspiration. It is a lived, organised, and increasingly visible reality and it is being led, intellectually and practically, by women. From the cells of Qarchak and Evin prisons to the podiums of Washington, women are defining both the urgency of accountability and the architecture of Iran’s democratic future. Any honest account of this revolutionary moment must recognise the work women have done as strategists, jurists, organisers and front‑line protagonists.
Maryam Fakhar’s account of the looming massacre in Iran’s prisons, published when I was editor of ANZSIL Perspective, is, at its core, a woman human rights defender sounding a sophisticated legal alarm. She documents the post‑ceasefire campaign of mass transfers, alongside torture, denial of medical care, summary death sentences and enforced disappearances. This is not merely a story of struggle but smart recognition of violations of international law and customary norms.
Maryam moves beyond description to prescription. She calls explicitly for activation of international mechanisms, for universal‑jurisdiction investigations in Europe into both the 1988 massacre and current murderous crackdowns, and for Magnitsky‑style sanctions cleverly building a bridge from past impunity to present accountability and continued prevention, only a few months before thousands are now being massacred for protesting.
Her analysis also situated women and girls as specific targets of repression and yet we also see women as central actors in resistance. The arrests of teenage girls, the silencing of families, and the denial of healthcare are not merely collateral abuse but tools of a patriarchal carceral state that fears women’s agency. The legal duty to prevent atrocity, in her article, is inseparable from the duty to protect and empower those women who continue to resist from within and outside Iran.
Similarly, the Free Iran Convention 2025 in Washington was framed around a roadmap to a democratic, prosperous republic. That roadmap is repeatedly women‑led supported by scholars, former officials and parliamentarians through the Ten‑Point Plan for democratic transition and regime change by Iranians themselves without room for appeasement or foreign military intervention but focussing on the overthrow of the regime by the Iranian people and their organised resistance.
The future envisaged is the separation of religion and state, gender equality, free elections, judicial independence, minority autonomy and it reflects decades of observing how revolutions fail when women and their rights are relegated to the margins. Multiple speakers in Washington described this as the only credible alternative so we can conclude that Iranian women are writing the script for Iran and being brave enough to risk their lives doing so.
It must be particularly irritating for the Ayatollah and his Mullahs that those most silenced are now the most shouty. That irritation being measured in an appalling crackdown.
Maryam’s advocacy has directly dismantled myths against the desperate blog-style missiles from exiled monarchists and manufactured opposition efforts which ignore the lived experience, legal argument, and sheer bloody-mindedness of women in a coercive system who have spent their time working on a new institutional design.
The crime in progress in Iran’s prisons is now reflected on the streets of Iran – as best we can tell where the internet is down. It follows a line of inevitability from the unpunished mass executions of 1988 to present atrocities where women are and have been at the centre and still bravely continue to seek freedom.
Those who fail to listen to the women of Iran create at least three implications:
- Prevention strategies that ignore women’s leadership are not neutral; they are blind to the very people who are both most targeted and simultaneously the most effective in resisting.
- International engagement that treats Iranian women as victims rather than as survivors, partners and leaders will undercut their resilience and weaken the situation for the future.
- Recognising a women‑led movement as legitimate is not interference but a correction of the historic bias that comes with male‑dominated authoritarianism, a situation women confront in most States.
If governments, largely led by men, fail the necessary internal and external perspective this is a real weakness.
The ultimate question is not whether Iran’s revolution is being led by women; the evidence suggests that it already is. The real question for governments outside Iran, many of whom suggest they have feminist foreign policy and major ones who singularly prefer the opposite, is whether there will be any preparedness to accept reality that stability will only come by recognising the women who have risked everything knowing they can build the future in Iran.
