The prominent Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi has accused UNICEF of being negligent over its care of vulnerable children in Iran, and has sent a letter of complaint to the United Nations Children’s Fund on the matter.
Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her pioneering work in advancing children’s rights, women’s rights and refugee rights in Iran.
“The UNICEF office in Iran has done little to support children,” Ebadi told Kayhan Life in an exclusive interview. “It is important to note that despite repeated reminders to UNICEF regarding the shooting of individuals under the age of 18 during the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ protests—many of whom were killed or injured—there has been no meaningful response.”
“The purpose of making this statement public is not only to hold UNICEF accountable, but also to inform the Iranian public of the negligence of certain international organizations,” the Nobel laureate added.
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She said similar concerns “have been raised with UNICEF Iran about the execution of individuals who were minors at the time of their alleged crimes. Yet the organization has never publicly voiced support for these children.”
“In previous discussions I had years ago with UNICEF representatives in Iran, they explicitly stated that such issues fall outside the scope of their responsibilities,” she said.
UNICEF was contacted by Kayhan Life regarding Ebadi’s allegations and declined to comment.
Ebadi’s May 29 letter of complaint, which Kayhan Life has seen, detailed a range of concerns about UNICEF’s conduct in Iran and accused the child welfare organization of being silent about child rights violations in the Islamic Republic.
“The branch of that organization in Iran has been operating for years, but for reasons that are not clear to me and my fellow countrymen, it does not take effective action to fulfill its legal duty,” the letter to the UN said. “From protesting the execution of criminals under the age of 18, which has been reported to this organization many times, to ignoring the health and education of children and the content of educational books, there are many cases that UNICEF should have protested in Iran.”
The Islamic Republic of Iran consistently receives low scores on international child rights indices. In 2024, it ranked 91 out of 120 countries on the Kids Rights Index which measures the state of children’s rights in countries around the world.
It is currently the world’s most prolific executioner of children, with more than 160 children currently on death row.
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Iran’s government has also been criticized by human rights bodies for allowing child marriage in the country. Girls as young as nine in Iran can be married under Sharia law, with a sharp increase in child marriages since 2017 noted by government departments.
Nearly 1.1 million marriages involving girls were registered in Iran from 2014 to 2022, including 13,500 involving girls under the age of 13, though these numbers are likely to be conservative.
An estimated 69,103 babies were born to mothers aged between 10 and 19 in 2021, according to the National Organization for Civil Registration (NOCR). In the same year, 1,474 babies were born to mothers aged between 10 and 14.
The sexual abuse of boys in Iran is heavily underreported, and knowledge about child sexual abuse (CSA) is limited and inconsistent across the country. Research published in July 2022 by the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences in Tehran suggested that the prevalence of child abuse in Iran was estimated to be between 1.5 percent to 32.5 percent, while an estimated 25 percent of boys had suffered CSA in a secondary school in the city of Yazd.
At least 70 children were killed in brutal crackdowns by security forces during the 2022 protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody. Hundreds of children were also detained, injured and tortured by state officials during the demonstrations.
“I would like to take this opportunity to name a few children who were arrested during the Mahsa Amini protests and remain in prison: Beniyamin Kouhkan, Yasin Kabdani, Negar Dabbaghi, Milad Naseri, among others,” Ebadi told Kayhan Life.
The letter to the UN Children’s Fund, which was sent to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Fact-Finding Committee on Iran, also accused the Islamic Republic of using children to pressure political dissidents into agreeing with the government’s demands.
“One of the ways that the Islamic Republic of Iran uses to pressure civil and political activists is to abuse their children; in this way, they send the child to prison under false pretenses in order to force the father or mother to remain silent or cooperate with the government,” the letter said. “The filing of this case with a false charge is solely intended to harass this civil activist family in order to force them to remain silent and cooperate.”
In the letter, Ebadi highlighted a violent incident against 17-year-old Nima Khandan, the son of human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and imprisoned activist Reza Khandan. Nima was beaten and injured by prison guards at the notorious Evin prison during a visit to see his father in January, according to posts published on Sotoudeh’s instagram account.
Khandan was sentenced to five years in prison for “assembly and collusion against national security” and an additional one-year term for “propaganda activities against the Islamic Republic.”
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child condemned the use of violence against children during the 2022 protests, in an October 2022 press release issued by the UN Human Rights Office.
“The Committee on the Rights of the Child strongly condemns the grave violations of the rights of the child that are taking place in Iran in the context of peaceful protests following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16, 2022,” the committee said. “According to reliable reports, some children were shot with live ammunition, while others died as a result of beatings. Many families reported that, despite grieving for the loss of a child, they were pressured to absolve security forces by declaring that their children had committed suicide and making false confessions.”
