Soon after the 1979 Iranian revolution, women's appeals for equal protection of their rights were deemed by supporters of the new government to be remnants of European–U.S. imperialism. Over two decades later, Iranian women are at the vanguard of reform, calling for their civil rights once again. Now, with republican ideals authenticated by Islam through Iran's innovative state, an Islamic republic, women push for tangible procedural process in reformulated Islamico‐civil family courts that position them as individual rights‐bearing citizens.

In January 2000, Iranian government agents hailed a last‐minute death sentence reprieve as an expression of Islamic human rights. Officials mobilized a native source of human rights in the invocation of mercy. For some, the proliferation of human rights norms situates a state in the fold of modernity, whereas the “spectacle of the scaffold” suggests a premodern demonstration of sovereign power. Through a study of sovereign power and human rights, this article questions the seemingly clear‐cut divide between premodern and modern forms of justice and suggests that contemporary appeals to mercy as human rights should not be dismissed as being outside modern forms of state sovereignty.

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This article explores the gender implications of retributive punishment in Iran's criminal justice system with specific attention to the Islamic mandate of forgiveness. Iranian penal codes allow victims' families to forgive an offender through forbearance of their right of retribution. To mitigate or even cancel the retributive component of punishment in numerous crimes, including murder, defendants usually offer compensation. Through a study of the gendered logics of criminal sanctioning, forbearance, and compensation, this article brings to light some of the issues victims' families and defendants face. In doing so, this article explores the debates around one of the formal gender gaps in Iranian laws, unequal compensation in sanctioning, where the amount of reparation for the loss a woman's life is legally half that of a man's. Because of this, some accounts of Islamic criminal processes suggest that female family members are helpless victims or nonactors in legal negotiations. By studying how gendered social relations operate in Iran's criminal legal process, this article finds women playing key roles in family decisions to forgive or not. The examination of judicial processes, moreover, reveals some of the complexity of gender relations, which are not fixed, as static legal texts might suggest.

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