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Four Iranian Women's Rights Activists Sentenced to Prison

By The Media Line Staff

A campaign known as Change for Equity, aimed at collecting one million signatures calling for a change in the status of women in Iran, has landed four of the initiators of the initiative in jail. Parvin Ardalan, Jelveh Javaheri, Maryam Hosseinkhah and Nahid Keshavarz were all sentenced to four to six months in jail for publishing articles on two websites in a bid to change the status of women under the country's Shari'a - Islamic - law, various news agencies reported.

Since the start of the campaign two years ago some 50 of its campaigners have been either detained or sentenced to jail terms. The activists say women are relegated to second-class citizen status by laws that give men custody of children in divorce cases, restrict females to half the inheritance rights due to males and require a wife to seek her husband's permission to travel abroad.

The convictions come just days after members of the Change for Equity party celebrated a great victory when the Iranian parliament decided to indefinitely postpone the vote on a new family law that some argue would have facilitated polygamy.

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