Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Iranian women have spent decades fighting for their rights. It is a feminist movement that stretches back to the early 1900s. When the modern constitution in Iran was enacted in 1906, it promised equal rights before the law, but Iranian women were denied the right to vote and treated as second-class citizens. But they did not go quietly into the night. Iranian women and men protested; they took to the streets and marched. Eventually women were given the right to vote, six decades later. Those hard-won freedoms and rights were snatched away after 1979. But, again, they did not go silently into the night.

Iranian women today carry the fighting spirit of generations of Iranian women before them, continuing to fight for their human rights, continuing to demand their right to live freely as equal citizens. It was the death of Mahsa Amini in September last year that brought on this new civil rights movement, led by women and supported by men. Iranian women have had to live in a world where freedoms are granted inch by inch after decades of fighting but then brutally and quickly snatched away. Yet, throughout it all, their spirit remains unbroken. They continue to fight just as they always have, and we stand willing to support them.