Overview
- Prison officials say Goli Kouhkan will be pardoned only if she pays 10bn tomans (about £80,000) to the victim’s family and leaves Gorgan, or she will be executed.
- Kouhkan, 25, has spent about seven years on death row in Gorgan after a 2018 qisas conviction linked to her husband’s death during a fight involving her cousin.
- Campaigners report she was married at 12, endured years of abuse, and signed a confession during interrogation without a lawyer despite being illiterate.
- She is from the marginalised Baluch minority, lacks identity documents, and is unlikely to have contact with her 11-year-old son, who is with his paternal grandparents.
- Iran Human Rights and Amnesty International cite her case within a sharp rise in executions in 2024–25, including dozens of women, underlining systemic due-process concerns.