A/HRC/31/26 F. Situation of women 35. The Islamic Republic of Iran has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in addition to other treaties that prohibit discrimination. However, it is not a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. As the Human Rights Committee observed in concluding observations adopted in 2011 (CCPR/C/IRN/CO/3), the status of the international human rights treaties in domestic law is not specified in the legal system, which hinders the full implementation of the rights contained in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. 36. The Secretary-General remains concerned about violations of the human rights of women, including in relation to freedom of movement, the right to health and the right to work. Following the adoption of the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice in April 2015, strict and discriminatory rules on women’s and girls’ dress are being enforced across the country. On 15 November, police announced that cars driven by women not wearing the hijab would be impounded for a week and fines would be imposed.30 The police allegedly use this provision to intimidate and harass women, and also to subject them to physical violence and imprisonment. On 15 December, the head of the Tehran traffic police was quoted in the media as stating that during the previous eight months, traffic police had dealt with 40,000 cases of “bad hijabs”, with vehicles seized and their owners brought before the courts.31 These regulations violate women’s and girls’ human rights and limit their ability to carry out essential daily activities. The authorities stressed that wearing the hijab was a moral matter and its imposition in public places was to maintain security. 37. There has been no progress in efforts to end child marriages. According to The Global Gender Gap Report 2015, 21 per cent of Iranian women aged between 15 and 19 married as children.32 The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that between 2005 and 2013, 17 per cent of girls in the Islamic Republic of Iran were married by the age of 18.33 Despite recommendations emerging from the second cycle of the universal periodic review and increasing awareness of the harm caused by early and forced marriages, the legal age of marriage for girls in the Islamic Republic of Iran, established by the Civil Code, is still 13 years old. Article 1041 of the Code also allows girls under the legal age to be married with the consent of their father or the permission of a court. The Code further stipulates that, regardless of the bride’s age, if she is a virgin, she needs her father’s or grandfather’s consent to marry. Child and forced marriages result in numerous human rights violations, including violations of the rights to employment, education and other opportunities for girls and young women, and expose them to a variety of forms of violence. Several United Nations human rights experts, special procedure mandate holders 34 and treaty bodies35 have established that neither cultural diversity nor freedom of religion may justify discrimination against women. In their comments on the present report, the authorities acknowledged that there had been occurrences of underage marriage in rural areas and noted that it was legitimate in some regions, owing to geography and sexual 30 31 32 33 34 35 See www.iranhumanrights.org/2015/11/hijab-new-restrictions/. See http://shohadayeiran.com/fa/news/101470/ (in Persian). World Economic Forum, The Global Gender Gap Report 2015 (Cologny, Switzerland, 2015). See http://data.unicef.org/corecode/uploads/document6/uploaded_pdfs/ corecode/SOWC_2015_Summary_and_Tables_210.pdf. See, for example, A/67/287, A/68/290 and A/HRC/26/22 and Corr.1. See Human Rights Committee, general comment No. 28 (2000) on the equality of rights between men and women, para. 21; and Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, general comment No. 21 (2009) on the right of everyone to take part in cultural life, paras. 18 and 64. 11