Iran's Beleaguered Women

Bad week for Iranian women:

Nine Iranian women say that the U.S. failed to grant them visas and effectively barred them from attending the 51st session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women taking place in New York right now. This is a pity, which by the way contradicts the Bush administration's avowed priority on the advancement of women in the Islamic world. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi testifies to the tremendous contribution women are making to positive development and change in Iran. I hope the visa problem was due to bureaucracy and cumbersome security reviews, as the State Department suggested was the case in the visa problems of Iranian reformers I noted in a blog last week. But the USG ought to figure out a better way of facilitating the cultural exchange it says it wants with Iranians.

Human Rights Watch is confirming the arrests of women's activists on Sunday in Tehran, a development I first learned about when nwa posted the news on TIME's Middle East Blog the same day.

HRW is saying that Iranian security forces arrested 33 prominent women's rights activists who were holding a silent peaceful protest in front of the revolutionary court where four of their colleagues were on trial for holding another peaceful protest last June 12. HRW says the list is a who's who of the women's rights movement across the political spectrum in Iran. HRW says the women are being held in Evin prison with no formal charges filed against them thus far.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo