Violations of Women's and Children's Health Rights in Iranian Prisons

Babak Khatti, Hamed Farmand, and Marie Claire Van Hout

Escalation of military conflict is intensifying an already profound human rights and public health crisis inside Iran’s prisons. The UN has documented the lack of evacuation plans in prisons during military attacks, reduced public oversight of prisons, and collapse of essential services. Prisoners are wholly dependent on the authorities, and the conflict is amplifying potential for torture and rights violations. Conditions are harsh, unsafe and severely overcrowded, with extreme water and food shortages, inadequate hygiene and sanitation, disease outbreaks, restricted and denied medical care, routine chemical sedation and abuse of prisoners, limited family contact, and forced transfers have been reported. Among those exposed to amplified risk to life and health are a group rarely counted in official prison figures: children living with their imprisoned mothers.

Iran holds an estimated 6880 women in prison. There are no updated official data on the number of imprisoned pregnant women and mothers, or how many children live with them in prison. The most recent 2020 estimate from UNICEF was 1,108 children in correction and rehabilitations centres and 197 incarcerated mothers with infants. Iran executes the highest recorded number of women globally, and executions have intensified in recent years with 48 women executed in 2025, and 26 women including a mother of two children since the beginning of 2026.

National legal frameworks offer children living in prison little protection in practice, despite classification of children with an imprisoned parent as ‘at risk’ in the Law on the Protection of Children and Adolescents. Article 523 of the Code of Criminal Procedure permits a child to stay with their mother until two years of age. The Prison Organisation regulations of 2021 (Clause A, Article 158) provides discretionary extensions up to six years. Custody defaults to the father or paternal grandfather. Where the child’s father is unknown, there is effectively no legal guardian available to take them, and consequently children remain in prison. Older children have been observed to be living in prison.

There is a deep contradiction between written laws, regulatory gaps in the Iranian penal system, and the lived reality inside prisons revealing a multitude of human rights violations. Women with their children in prison are often excluded from social protection measures. They live in harsh and inhumane conditions, enduring severe physical and psychological pressures including solitary confinement, threats of separation and denial of medical care, with grave consequences for maternal and child health. Prison budgets do not have special provisions for infants (food, basic needs, paediatric care), and children experience substantial sensory and developmental deprivation and associated clinical symptoms due to the restricted environment. In 2016 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child documented that children (in particular Baha’i children) living with their mothers in Iranian prisons had developed medical problems attributable to their living conditions.

Harm continues after release. Prolonged imprisonment of children and separation from their mothers on exit, often into state care, contribute to substantial socio-development and health problems. This is especially the case for children without identification documents who are administratively excluded from basic healthcare (such as state vaccinations) and school enrolment post-release. Once a child enters the welfare system contact with their mother is also typically severed. There are reports of children being sold after exit from prison.

Deplorable conditions of detention and exposure to harm breach Iran’s obligations as a State Party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) which Iran ratified in 1994, and also contravene international norms contained in the UN Bangkok Rules, which provide that decisions on children living with their mothers in prison are based on the child’s best interests, that children living in prison receive adequate healthcare and experience an environment as close as possible to life outside prison (Rules 49-52). Non-custodial measures are preferred for pregnant women and women with dependent children (Rule 64). Iran’s broad reservation to the UN CRC based on Islamic law does not release it from these core obligations.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for the immediate protection of prisoners, the release of arbitrarily detained individuals, and a halt to the implementation of death sentences. National law provides an immediate remedy through the Iranian Directive 211 of the Supreme Judicial Council (1987). It establishes specific obligations for judicial authorities during emergency and wartime conditions to review the status of prisoners and temporarily release non-dangerous detainees (such as women and infants). But this has not (yet) been invoked despite amplified security measures and grave concerns around safety and rights violations of the imprisoned.

We call on Iran’s judiciary and the Iran Prisons Organization to act on five points.

1. Invoke Directive 211 and prioritize the temporary release of pregnant women and mothers held with children, particularly those detained on crimes of poverty or drug offences
2. Make non-custodial sentences the default for mothers of children under the age of six years
3. Streamline robust welfare protocols between the Prisons Organization and the State Welfare Organization so that children can receive civil registration if born in prison
4. Place children promptly with family or foster care on exit from prison
5. Permit the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF, and independent paediatric monitors to access facilities holding women. Assessment of standards of detention, and disaggregated data on numbers of affected children is needed.

Children who have committed no offence must not bear the combined costs of war and their mothers’ imprisonment. The international community must not remain silent. Urgent humanitarian action is needed to protect this invisible population of children as a child-rights and child-health priority.

Babak Khatti, MD, paediatrician and independent researcher in child health and child rights, Duisburg, Germany.

Hamed Farmand, BA, President, Children of Imprisoned Parents International, Merrifield, Virginia, United States.

Marie Claire Van Hout, PhD, Office of the Vice President of Research, Innovation and Impact, South East Technological University, Waterford, Ireland.

Please address correspondence to Marie Claire Van Hout. Email: marieclaire.vanhout@setu.ie