Access to Compensation for Sexual Violence: A Comparative Analysis of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code and International Law

Abstract

Sexual violence produces enduring and multidimensional harm, yet how legal systems compensate it varies in ways a comparison of remedies alone cannot capture. This article examines compensation for sexual violence under the Iranian Islamic Penal Code, structured around the classical categories of diyya, qisas, arsh, and taʿzir, alongside the reparation frameworks of international human rights, humanitarian, and criminal law. Adopting a doctrinal and comparative method, it treats compensation not as a remedy following a given injury but as a process through which a legal order constitutes the injury as an object it can recognize and value. The comparison is organized around five questions: what each system recognizes as injury, who holds the claim, how it is valued, what its categories exclude, and what separates promised from delivered redress. The two frameworks diverge not incidentally but in their underlying conceptions of harm. Yet neither provides a straightforward measure of the other: the international order is internally plural and marked by its own gap between promise and delivery, while Iran’s gendered valuations are contested within juristic reasoning and their distributive effects are mitigated, if incompletely, through state-funded supplementation. The article relocates access from delivery to the point at which a system defines what the injury of sexual violence is and what it is worth.

1. Introduction

Sexual violence is among the most severe and persistent forms of gender-based harm, and its effects extend well beyond the moment of assault, producing lasting psychological, social, and economic consequences for those who survive it (World Health Organization 2002). How a legal system responds to that harm—whether it recognizes its full dimensions, and what it offers by way of redress—is therefore a question of some consequence. Compensation is a revealing point at which to examine that response, because it is the mechanism through which a legal order translates an injury into a value it is prepared to recognize and repay. To ask how a system compensates sexual violence is to ask what, in that system, the injury is taken to be.

This article examines that question by comparing the compensatory framework of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, structured around the classical categories of diyya, qisas, arsh, and taʿzir, with international frameworks of reparation developed across human rights, humanitarian, and international criminal law. Each has been the subject of substantial scholarship. The operation of Iranian criminal law has been studied ethnographically and doctrinally, including the workings of qisas and diyya and the practices of forgiveness and settlement that surround them (Osanloo 2020); the gendered operation of Islamic family law and the regulation of sexuality and criminality have generated substantial scholarship of their own (Mir-Hosseini 2000; Mir-Hosseini and Hamzić 2010); and the international jurisprudence on sexual violence and reparation has generated an extensive body of commentary (Rubio-Marín 2009; Ní Aoláin et al. 2015). The present study builds on this work rather than claiming to write on empty ground.

What has received little sustained comparative attention is the specific question that emerges when the two are set side by side: how each constitutes the injury of sexual violence as a compensable object, and what the comparison reveals about the assumptions each embeds concerning harm, the body, and the person. Existing studies of the Iranian framework have tended to concentrate on the doctrinal interpretation of diyya or the criminalization of sexual offences; the international literature has developed its account of reparation largely in isolation from the classical categories of Islamic criminal law. The comparison itself—and, more particularly, the treatment of compensation as a process through which each system translates harm into legal value—is where this article locates its contribution.

The article proceeds from the premise that compensation does not merely respond to a harm given in advance but participates in defining what counts as harm, how it is valued, and whose loss it represents. On that basis it develops an analytical framework capable of holding the Iranian framework and these international mechanisms in view without treating either as the self-evident measure of the other, and it argues that the divergence between them arises not incidentally but from their underlying conceptions of injury—their distinct epistemologies of harm. It situates this argument, too, within feminist debates on the reach and limits of legal responses to sexual violence, including the critique of carceral feminism, drawing on those debates not to resolve them but to ask how each legal order defines, measures, and prices the harm it undertakes to repair. The sections that follow set out the analytical framework, the methodology, and the two systems in turn, before bringing them into structured comparison.

2. Analytical Framework: The Legal Valuation of Gendered Harm

2.1. Compensation, Commensuration, and the Legal Valuation of Gendered Harm

This article proceeds from the premise that compensation is not merely a remedy that follows harm, but a process through which legal systems constitute harm as a recognizable object. Before any payment is made, a prior operation must occur: the injury—embodied, psychological, social, and singular—must be converted into a form that law can register, measure, and price. Sociological scholarship describes this operation as commensuration: the transformation of qualitatively distinct experiences into a common metric that renders them comparable and exchangeable. Drawing on Espeland and Stevens, decisions about what is measured, in what units, and according to which standards can be understood as forms of social and political ordering that necessarily simplify—and may exclude—dimensions of experience that resist quantification (Espeland and Stevens 1998, pp. 314–15). Compensation regimes for sexual violence are, in this sense, commensuration mechanisms: they determine which injuries count, at what value, and on whose testimony.

Feminist legal theory sharpens this insight by directing attention to what is produced—and what is lost—when suffering enters legal form. Smart’s account of law’s juridogenic power emphasizes that law does not simply respond to harms presented to it but defines what qualifies as harm in the first place, translating lived experience into categories that may bear little relation to experience as lived (Smart 1989). The politics of recognition compounds this problem. Once injury becomes the ground of a legal claim, as Brown argues, the claimant may be fixed in the identity assigned by the legal category, while the adjudicating state is affirmed as the arbiter of the injury’s meaning (Brown 1995, pp. 27–28). The question to ask of any compensation regime, then, is not only whether it pays adequately, but what conception of the injured person—and of the injury—it presupposes and reproduces.

This inquiry is particularly important in relation to sexual violence because its injury is not confined to physical damage. It extends across psychological, social, and relational dimensions, and its weight is shaped by the gendered conditions in which it is experienced. Survivors may confront stigma, familial exclusion, threats to personal security, and diminished access to support—consequences arising from the surrounding social order as well as from the act itself (Ní Aoláin et al. 2015, pp. 110–11). Every compensation regime must therefore select which dimensions of this injury it will recognize, and that selection is never neutral (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Where a framework measures harm through concepts such as honour, virginity, or marriageability, it relocates the object of legal attention from the survivor’s experience to her standing within a gendered social and familial order (Mir-Hosseini and Hamzić 2010; Ní Aoláin et al. 2015, pp. 110–11). What is registered is not simply what was done to her, but what is perceived to have diminished her value to others.

The point, however, is not that one legal tradition sees injury clearly while another necessarily distorts it. Frameworks formally oriented toward multidimensional reparation may also fail in practice to recognize psychological and structural harm. Every legal order draws a boundary around what it will treat as the injury of sexual violence, rendering some dimensions legible and others invisible. Vernacularization adds a further caution: international human rights norms rarely arrive in domestic settings intact, but are translated, appropriated, and reshaped within local legal and cultural vocabularies (Merry 2006). International standards should not therefore be treated as a self-evident metric against which domestic systems are simply measured. Attention must instead be paid to the doctrinal, jurisprudential, and institutional vocabularies through which each legal order translates harm into value.

What emerges is the article’s central analytical claim: legal systems operate with distinct epistemologies of harm—distinct ways of knowing, classifying, and validating injury—and compensation is the site where these epistemologies become material. Two systems may both compensate survivors of sexual violence while giving fundamentally different answers to what was harmed, how that harm is known, and in what currency it can be repaid. The comparative analysis developed here is therefore not an exercise in ranking legal systems against a single scale. It examines two commensuration regimes—one articulated through the doctrinal categories of the Iranian Islamic Penal Code and the other through the reparations framework of international law—and the conceptions of gendered injury that each renders legible or illegible.

2.2. Reparations in International Law: Framework and Its Critics

If compensation is the site at which a legal order translates harm into value, international law offers not a single answer to that problem but a family of overlapping and sometimes competing ones. Its organizing premise is that reparation for grave violations is inherently multidimensional rather than reducible to a monetary transfer. The UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (2005) identify five forms—restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition—addressing dimensions ranging from material loss to the restoration of dignity and prevention of recurrence (UN General Assembly 2005). The Secretary-General’s Guidance Note on Reparations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (2014) extends this architecture by requiring attention to the social and structural conditions in which sexual violence occurs, not merely its immediate physical consequences (UN Secretary-General 2014).

This multidimensional promise, however, is rarely realized fully in practice, particularly where resources, institutional capacity, and political commitment are limited. In such settings, reparation may contract toward individualized monetary compensation, while rehabilitation and guarantees of non-repetition remain underdeveloped (Ní Aoláin et al. 2015, pp. 140–41). The international framework therefore cannot be treated as the straightforward embodiment of its stated principles; comparison must attend to the distance between doctrine and delivery on both sides.

International reparation is also situated within a broader project of substantive equality. CEDAW General Recommendation No. 35 (2017) frames gender-based violence as a structural manifestation of women’s subordination rather than a series of discrete harms (CEDAW Committee 2017). This informs the aspiration toward transformative reparation: measures intended not merely to restore a survivor to her prior position—itself potentially one of disadvantage—but to alter the inequalities that made the violence possible (Ní Aoláin et al. 2015, pp. 102–3). Yet the broader the task assigned to reparation, extending from redress for individual injury to the transformation of structural inequality, the more visible the tension between normative ambition and institutional delivery becomes.

A further strand operates through international criminal justice. Article 75 of the Rome Statute incorporated reparation into the International Criminal Court’s mandate rather than leaving it entirely to separate civil proceedings (International Criminal Court 1998, art. 75). The Court’s reparations practice, channelled substantially through the Trust Fund for Victims, combines individual and collective measures. The 2021 reparations order in Ntaganda, which extended recognition to victims of sexual violence and children born of rape, illustrates both the model’s reach and the difficulty of translating such recognition into delivered reparation (International Criminal Court 2021).

These developments have not gone uncontested within feminist legal thought. Critiques of “carceral feminism” question whether aligning feminist aims with the punitive and reparative machinery of states and international institutions serves survivors or subordinates their interests to prosecutorial, expressive, or geopolitical ends (Halley et al. 2006; Engle 2020). Related scholarship turns the lens on international criminal justice itself: Mibenge (2013) demonstrates how gendered assumptions shape which harms are narrated and recognized, while Campbell (2022) identifies the construction of the victim-subject as a continuing site of feminist contestation. These critiques do not discredit international reparation, but they unsettle any straightforward characterization of it as survivor-centered. They raise a question to which the comparative analysis returns: whether foregrounding punishment and payment, in either legal order, risks instrumentalizing the survivor in the service of ends not her own.

International law thus does not stand outside the problem of commensuration. It represents one elaborated response to it—ambitious in its multidimensional conception of repair, internally contested, and marked by distance between principle and practice. It is against this understanding, rather than an idealized international benchmark, that the Iranian framework is examined.

2.3. Islamic Legal Conceptions of Bodily Harm and Compensation

The Islamic juristic tradition approaches injury to the person through a conceptual architecture that differs at its foundations from the international framework outlined above. Offences are classified according to whether the entitlement they implicate belongs principally to God or to human beings, while homicide and bodily injury are generally treated as wrongs in which the claim of an identifiable person predominates (Peters 2005, pp. 38–39; Hallaq 2009, pp. 308–12). The consequence is structural: the injured party—or, in cases of homicide, the victim’s heirs—holds the claim and may demand retaliation, waive it, or reach a settlement involving monetary compensation (Peters 2005, pp. 39, 50–53). Qisas and diyya represent two possible responses to the injury: the former expresses equivalence between the harm inflicted and the authorized response, while the latter provides monetary compensation in place of retaliation.

Read on its own terms, this is not a system indifferent to the victim. It places significant authority over the disposition of the claim in the hands of the person harmed rather than assigning it exclusively to a prosecutorial authority acting in the name of society. It thereby creates space for retaliation, compensation, waiver, and negotiated settlement. Osanloo’s ethnography of Iranian criminal justice shows this logic operating particularly clearly in homicide proceedings, where victims’ families possess legal authority to demand retribution or to forgo it, with or without compensation (Osanloo 2020, pp. 2–3). The tradition’s answer to the question of who controls the claim is therefore a coherent one, and it differs from the state-centred premise underlying much of international criminal law.

Within this architecture, diyya operates as a distinctive commensuration regime. It does not begin by assessing the injury experienced by a particular victim and then assigning it a price. Instead, it applies a pre-established tariff: a full diyya for the loss of life and stipulated fractions for the loss of limbs, senses, and bodily functions. Injuries falling outside that tariff are subject to a residual process of assessed compensation, conventionally described as ḥukūmat al-ʿadl (Peters 2005, pp. 49–50). The value assigned to an injury is therefore determined principally by its anatomical or functional classification rather than by the suffering it produced in a particular person.

Certain classical rules also make attributes of the injured person relevant to valuation. Most consequentially, the full blood price of a woman was fixed at half that of a man, with corresponding effects on the valuation of bodily injuries (Peters 2005, p. 49). This is a coherent method of commensuration, but one in which the principal question is what was lost according to a settled scale rather than what was suffered by this particular person. Gendered differentiation thus arises not from an individualized finding that women suffer less, but from a valuation attached to the injured person before the particular harm is assessed.

The treatment of sexual offences is shaped not only by these compensatory categories but also by a demanding evidentiary architecture. Hudud offences, including zina, require proof of an exceptional order—multiple eyewitnesses to the act itself or repeated confession—and are further constrained by the principle that fixed punishments should be averted where doubt remains. Rabb demonstrates that this doubt canon operated not as an incidental procedural rule but as a substantive instrument of juristic restraint, systematically narrowing the circumstances in which the severest sanctions could be imposed (Rabb 2015, pp. 65–66, 96–98, 124–26). Within the tradition’s own priorities, the gravest consequences of conviction were thus matched by an exceptionally demanding standard of proof.

The same architecture, however, creates a difficulty that its restraining rationale does not resolve. Conduct that does not satisfy the hadd threshold may fall within taʿzir, where adjudicative discretion is broader, but this residual domain is organized primarily around the calibration of punishment rather than the assessment of the survivor’s harm. For a person subjected to sexual violence, the evidentiary safeguards that restrain severe punishment may consequently narrow the route through which the injury can be authoritatively established. The restraint and the gap are two aspects of the same legal design and must be evaluated together. Feminist engagement with Islamic sexual ethics further demonstrates that the categories structuring this field remain open to critical reconstruction from within the tradition rather than settled beyond question (Ali 2016).

The differential valuation of women’s diyya has likewise not remained uncontested in contemporary juristic discourse. Shaham’s analysis concerns a specifically Sunni debate surrounding Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī’s 2005 fatwa holding that a woman’s diyya equals that of a man. Its relevance here lies not in establishing the Imami position but in demonstrating the interpretive contestability of a rule frequently presented as doctrinally fixed (Shaham 2021). Comparable contestation has emerged within contemporary Imami jurisprudence. Most notably, Yūsuf Ṣāniʿī argued for equality in the diyya of women and men, relying on the general and gender-neutral scope of foundational proofs concerning diyya while challenging the authority and sufficiency of the reports conventionally invoked to justify differential valuation (Ṣāniʿī 2011; Rad Goudarzi 2021).

Ṣāniʿī’s reasoning reflected a distinctive jurisprudential methodology: it treated the Sunna as secondary to the Qurʾān, rejected consensus as an independent basis of legal rulings, and accepted that sharia rulings may change over time (Akbar 2021). His position remains a minority one and has itself been subject to sustained juristic criticism (Ebrahimnezhad 2016). Nevertheless, it demonstrates that arguments for equal valuation can be generated from within Islamic jurisprudential reasoning rather than only through external human rights norms. This contestation forms part of a broader intellectual project to rethink gender within an Islamic legal framework (Mir-Hosseini 2022), making the classical rule a continuing site of argument rather than a fixed inheritance.

This matters for comparative analysis because it cautions against treating the classical position as an immovable constraint that contemporary legal systems simply inherit. How a jurisdiction responds to internal arguments for equality—whether by revising the rule, preserving it while adjusting its practical effects, or declining to engage with them—involves legal and political choices within a space of doctrinal contestation. The Iranian response is examined in detail below.

What emerges is a coherent epistemology of harm rather than an incomplete approximation of another framework. Its premises are identifiable: injury to the person generates a claim held by the injured party or the heirs rather than exclusively by the political community; the value of that claim is determined by a scale established in advance rather than by an individualized inquiry into suffering; the gravest sanctions require evidentiary certainty of an exceptional order; and the categories organizing these rules remain subject to internal argument. Each premise answers a question that any compensation regime must address, and each has consequences for what is recognized as injury, who may claim, and what remains outside the legal frame. The task of comparison is therefore not simply to contrast outcomes but to examine the distinct conceptions of the person, injury, and claim from which those outcomes proceed.

2.4. Implications for Comparative Analysis

The two frameworks reconstructed above answer a common set of questions differently, and those questions—rather than the substantive position of either system—supply the terms of comparison. Five guide the analysis. What counts as the injury of sexual violence, and which dimensions does a legal order recognize as compensable? Who holds the claim and is authorized to pursue, settle, or relinquish it? By what method is the injury converted into value—through individualized assessment or a scale established in advance? Which harms and claimants remain outside the system’s categories of recognition? And what distance separates the norm as articulated from the redress actually delivered?

Organizing the comparison around these questions directs attention to the premises from which each legal order proceeds rather than to a tally of the remedies it provides, and it applies the same interrogation to both. The gap between doctrine and delivery is examined in the international and Iranian frameworks alike; the question of who controls the claim is put to the ICC’s prosecutorial model as much as to the structure of qisas.

This approach is not normatively neutral, and the article does not claim otherwise. International standards provide the primary normative reference point because Iran is a party to the ICCPR and the ICESCR, which impose obligations relevant to equality and non-discrimination, bodily integrity, health, and effective redress. Iran has not, however, acceded to CEDAW, the principal international treaty addressing discrimination against women. Its non-accession limits the treaty obligations it has formally accepted but does not remove Iran from the broader international human rights framework. International human rights law therefore provides a common normative vocabulary through which the two frameworks can be compared, while Iran’s selective participation shapes what that comparison can establish. These implications and limitations are addressed further in the methodology section.

The following section sets out the methodology. Section 4 and Section 5 then examine the international frameworks and the Iranian Islamic Penal Code respectively, before Section 6 brings them into structured comparison through the five questions identified above.

3. Methodology

This study employs a qualitative legal methodology combining doctrinal and comparative analysis. The doctrinal component rests on a close reading of the Iranian Islamic Penal Code of 2013, focusing on the provisions governing diyya, qisas, arsh, and taʿzir, together with those bearing on sexual offences and the evidentiary standards attached to them. Because codified provisions cannot be understood apart from the juristic reasoning that informs them, the analysis draws on three further bodies of material: classical doctrinal scholarship on bodily harm and compensation, engaged in the framework above (Peters 2005; Hallaq 2009); contemporary Imami juristic commentary on the 2013 Code, including Mir-Mohammad Sadeghi’s Jarāyem ʿalayh-e Tamāmiyyat-e Jesmānī-ye Ashkhāṣ [Crimes against the Physical Integrity of Persons] (Mir-Mohammad Sadeghi 2024); and the ongoing juristic debate over the gendered valuation of diyya, which includes both reformist arguments and their critics (Ṣāniʿī 2011; Rad Goudarzi 2021; Ebrahimnezhad 2016; Shaham 2021). On the international side, the study works from primary instruments and jurisprudence—treaty texts, the reparations principles, and the decisions of the international and regional courts—read alongside the secondary scholarship interpreting them.

The study is concerned with Iranian law as it stands following the 2013 recodification, and it treats the developments that have followed from that Code—including subsequent judicial rulings and the institutional arrangements governing the payment of compensation—as within its scope rather than as background to an earlier settled position. This temporal framing matters for a comparative analysis of a legal order that has continued to change, and it distinguishes the questions this article can address from those it cannot.

Comparative legal analysis is never conducted from a position outside the systems it compares. As Frankenberg observed, the comparatist’s own legal formation tends to furnish the implicit standard against which other systems are read, so that the familiar order silently assumes the status of the norm and the unfamiliar one appears as its deviation (Frankenberg 1985). This study adopts international human rights and reparations standards as its primary point of reference, and it does so deliberately rather than by default. The choice rests on a specific ground: Iran is itself a party to core instruments of the international human rights order, having ratified the ICCPR and the ICESCR, which impose binding obligations relating to equality, non-discrimination, bodily integrity, and effective redress.1 These commitments make international standards not an external imposition but a body of norms to which the Iranian state is already answerable, and therefore a defensible basis for comparison.

Adopting this reference point nonetheless carries analytical consequences that the study does not conceal. Measuring against international standards risks reproducing precisely the asymmetry Frankenberg identified, in which one system supplies the criteria and the other is judged by them. The analysis guards against this in two ways: by reconstructing the Iranian framework in its own conceptual terms before subjecting it to comparison, as the preceding section has done, and by applying the same criteria—including the distance between stated norm and delivered remedy—to the international frameworks as well as to the Iranian one. What the comparison can establish is thus bounded by its chosen vantage point, and that boundary is acknowledged rather than assumed away.

Several limitations follow from this design. The first is evidentiary: as a doctrinal and comparative study, the analysis does not draw on case records, judicial statistics, or interviews, and therefore cannot show how often compensation is claimed or awarded, how ifdāʾ or other injuries are litigated in practice, or how survivors experience the processes described. Its claims concern the structure of the legal frameworks, not the empirical frequency of outcomes, and the structural argument should be read with that boundary in mind. The absence marks a direction for subsequent empirical inquiry rather than a gap the present analysis purports to fill.

A second limitation is interpretive. The Iranian provisions are approached through their codified text and through scholarly commentary, and in places through translation; the doctrinal categories at issue—diyya, arsh, taʿzir, ifdāʾ—carry meanings shaped by a juristic tradition that no rendering into English fully preserves. The analysis has therefore retained the original terms rather than substituting approximate equivalents, but the interpretive distance remains a condition of the work. Related to this is a third limitation: the gap between rules as written and rules as applied. Codified provisions do not determine how courts exercise the discretion the law leaves them, and the considerable interpretive latitude of taʿzir in particular means that formal doctrine and judicial practice may diverge in ways a doctrinal reading cannot capture. Where the analysis notes such divergence, it does so on the basis of documented rulings rather than systematic observation of adjudication.

These limitations are real, but they are the limitations proper to the questions the study asks. They bound its claims without undermining them, and together with the normative positioning discussed above they mark the terrain on which the comparative analysis proceeds.

4. Reparations Across International Legal Orders

The international response to sexual violence is often invoked as a single normative standard, yet it is more accurately understood as a set of distinct legal orders, each proceeding from its own premises about responsibility, redress, and the harm to be repaired. This section examines four such orders in turn—regional human rights adjudication, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and the institutional machinery of reparation—not to assemble them into a unified benchmark, but to show where their logics converge and where they diverge. The differences are as instructive as the commonalities, and they bear directly on what it means to compare any domestic system against “international standards.”

4.1. Regional Human Rights Adjudication

Regional human rights courts have established that states bear obligations not only to prevent and punish sexual violence but also to repair it, yet they have done so through markedly different reparative logics. The European Court of Human Rights approaches sexual violence primarily through the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 of the Convention. In Aydin v. Turkey, the Court held that the rape of a detainee by state agents constituted torture, reasoning that the act’s severity lay not only in physical injury but also in the psychological harm and the destruction of the victim’s sense of security and dignity (European Court of Human Rights 1997, paras. 83–86). The significance of the judgment for the present analysis lies in what it recognized as the injury: the Court’s reasoning extended the legal understanding of harm beyond the somatic to encompass its psychological and dignitary dimensions, and it did so while insisting on the state’s procedural obligation to conduct an effective investigation. The reparative model that follows from this jurisprudence is characteristically individualized—compensation awarded to the applicant for a violation established against the respondent state.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has developed a reparative logic of a different order. In González et al. (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico, concerning the abduction and murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, the Court moved beyond individualized compensation toward what it framed as reparation with a transformative vocation: measures directed not only at redressing the specific victims but at the structural conditions of gender-based violence that made the harm possible (Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2009, paras. 450–51). As Rubio-Marín and Sandoval argue, this represents a significant departure from a merely restitutionary model: where victims’ prior circumstances were themselves marked by structural discrimination, adequate reparation cannot simply seek to restore the status quo ante but must also pursue corrective transformation (Rubio-Marín and Sandoval 2011, pp. 1088–91). The contrast with the European approach is instructive: where the ECtHR’s model centres on the individual violation and its compensation, the Inter-American model reaches toward the social structure, and the two cannot be collapsed into a single “regional human rights standard” without erasing the difference.

4.2. International Humanitarian Law

A third body of norms addresses sexual violence as a matter of international humanitarian law, applicable in situations of armed conflict. The Geneva Convention framework characterizes rape and enforced prostitution as attacks on personal dignity and bodily integrity, and authoritative readings have long treated such acts as forms of torture or inhuman treatment even where they are not expressly enumerated as grave breaches (Geneva Convention IV 1949, art. 27; International Committee of the Red Cross 2005). The relevant reparative logic emerges from the interaction between humanitarian law and the general law of state responsibility: where a violation is attributable to a state, it engages that state’s responsibility and, with it, an obligation to make reparation (UN General Assembly 2005).

This body of law bears on the present analysis only obliquely, and the limit is worth stating plainly. Its primary concern is conduct connected with armed conflict, whereas the sexual violence examined in this article—and addressed by the Iranian Penal Code—arises predominantly outside situations of hostilities. Humanitarian law is therefore relevant here not as a directly applicable standard but as part of the broader international legal architecture of reparation. In conjunction with the law of state responsibility, it illustrates a model in which an attributable breach of an international obligation gives rise to a duty to make reparation, while the form and extent of that reparation remain responsive to the injury caused. The substantive comparison developed below does not rely on humanitarian law’s conflict-specific rules.

4.3. International Criminal Law

International criminal law reconfigured the legal understanding of sexual violence by establishing that it could constitute one of the gravest offences known to international law. The tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were central to this shift: in Akayesu, the ICTR recognized rape as capable of constituting an act of genocide, while in Kunarac, the ICTY treated sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity and clarified the constitutive elements of rape and enslavement by reference to coercion, consent, and the exercise of powers attaching to ownership (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 1998, paras. 597–98, 731–34; Kunarac et al. 2001, paras. 437–60, 539–43). As MacKinnon observes, the significance of Akayesu lay in its recognition that rape and other forms of sexual violence could occupy the same legal plane as other acts of genocide when committed with the requisite intent to destroy the targeted group (MacKinnon 2006, pp. 238–39). This jurisprudence did not merely add sexual violence to an existing list of crimes; it altered the terms on which such violence was legally cognizable.

Yet the recognition secured through international criminal law is of a particular kind, and its limits are as analytically significant as its achievements. It is structured principally through individual criminal responsibility: the harm becomes legally cognizable through proceedings directed at establishing the responsibility of an accused person, while court-ordered reparations under Article 75(2) are likewise case-linked and ordinarily follow the conviction of the person against whom the order is made (International Criminal Court 1998, art. 75(2)). This structure has consequences for which harms are recognized and which survivors are reached. As Mibenge argues, international tribunals do not merely record experiences of sexual violence; by privileging certain accounts over others, they produce gendered narratives that shape which experiences become legally legible and which recede from view (Mibenge 2013, pp. 1–7). Recognition that depends on conviction is, by its nature, partial: it reaches the harms that can be proven against an identified defendant to the requisite standard and leaves the remainder outside the frame. The point is not to diminish the achievement but to locate it precisely—a mode of recognition powerful in what it grasps and constrained in what it can reach.

4.4. Institutionalization and the Gap in Delivery

The reparative commitments of international criminal law are institutionalized through the Trust Fund for Victims, established under Article 79 of the Rome Statute and operating alongside the Court’s judicial functions. The Fund’s two mandates are worth distinguishing, because they answer to different logics. Under its reparations mandate, it implements the redress a Chamber orders against a convicted person; under its assistance mandate, it may provide medical, psychological, and socio-economic support to affected communities independently of any conviction (Trust Fund for Victims 2018). Programmes in northern Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have combined individual and collective measures in this second mode, reaching survivors whose harm has never been the subject of a specific judicial finding. The assistance mandate thus loosens, in part, the dependence of recognition on conviction that the previous section identified—though it does so through discretionary, resource-dependent provision rather than as a matter of entitlement.

The reparations mandate, by contrast, exposes with particular clarity the distance between an award and its delivery. In the Ntaganda reparations order, the Court assessed the convicted person’s liability by reference to the scale and cost of the harm—including harm suffered by victims of sexual violence and children born of rape—while simultaneously finding him indigent, thereby making implementation substantially dependent on the Fund’s ability to mobilize sufficient resources (International Criminal Court 2021, paras. 183(c), 247, 254, 257). The order is, in this respect, a study in the limits of the model: full judicial recognition of harm coexists with a reparative promise whose fulfilment the Court cannot itself guarantee. This is not merely a contingent shortfall but reflects a structural feature of a system in which the right to reparation is judicially affirmed while its realization depends on resources that the judgment does not itself command (Balta et al. 2019, pp. 233–35).

Recent institutional developments have sought to address this recurring shortfall from outside the Court. The Global Survivors Fund, established in 2019, was created to enhance access to reparation for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and to help fill the gap that persists where states or other responsible parties are unable or unwilling to provide it (Global Survivors Fund 2024, pp. 3, 11). Its emergence is itself evidence of the gap described here: a dedicated institution becomes necessary because the reparative commitments of existing frameworks so often outrun their delivery. Taken together, these arrangements show an international order that has developed an elaborate architecture of recognition while continuing to struggle with the more intractable problem of provision.

Four legal orders, then, converge on the proposition that sexual violence generates an obligation to repair, and diverge on almost everything else: on where the obligation originates, on what the reparation is for, and on how, if at all, it reaches the survivor. The European model individualizes; the Inter-American reaches toward structural transformation; humanitarian law and state responsibility locate the duty in an attributable breach; international criminal law ties recognition to conviction. Across all of them runs a common gap between the norm as declared and the remedy as delivered, addressed but not closed by the institutional machinery examined above. To speak of an “international standard” against which a domestic system might be measured is therefore to speak elliptically. What exists is a plurality of reparative logics, held together by a shared commitment to recognition and a shared difficulty in realizing it—and it is this plurality, rather than a single settled benchmark, that the comparison with the Iranian framework must keep in view.

5. Compensation for Sexual Violence Under the Iranian Islamic Penal Code

5.1. The Classification of Sexual Offences and the Architecture of Proof

The Iranian Islamic Penal Code distributes sexual offences across the categories examined in the framework above, and the category into which an offence falls governs both how it must be proven and what redress, if any, follows. Forcible zina (zenā-ye be-ʿonf) is classified as a hadd offence, and its treatment is shaped decisively by the evidentiary architecture attached to that class. Under the Code, zina may be established through confession, testimony, or the judge’s knowledge (ʿelm-e qāżi) (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, arts. 160, 172, 199, 211). Each route is demanding. Proof by confession requires that the act be admitted four separate times (art. 172); where proof is sought through testimony, Article 199 ordinarily requires four male witnesses, subject to the limited gender-combined configurations the article specifies. The judge’s knowledge, for its part, does not denote unstructured personal belief: Article 211 defines it as certainty derived from manifest evidentiary grounds, which the judge must identify explicitly in the judgment (art. 211).

These thresholds are the codified expression of the doctrinal restraint discussed earlier. Their practical consequence for a person who has suffered sexual violence is the one the framework anticipated: the standard that governs the gravest sanction is rarely attainable, and conduct that cannot meet it does not thereby leave the law but passes into the discretionary domain of taʿzir. It is here, in the space of offences not exhaustively settled by the codified text, that the relationship between statute and jurisprudence becomes directly operative. Article 220 directs courts, with respect to hudud not specified in the Code, to act in accordance with Article 167 of the Constitution. Article 167 requires a judge who cannot find the applicable rule in codified law to decide the case by reference to authoritative Islamic sources or valid fatwas, and prohibits the judge from declining adjudication on the ground that the codified law is silent, deficient, ambiguous, or contradictory (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 220; Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran 1979, art. 167). The reach of this provision in the criminal sphere is contested, particularly against the principle of legality, and it should not be read as an open-ended license; but it establishes that the doctrinal categories reconstructed above are not merely the historical background to the Code—they remain a live source on which adjudication may draw.

The consequence for compensation is structural rather than incidental. Because the recognition of sexual violence as a hadd offence turns on an evidentiary threshold set beyond ordinary reach, and because the residual category of taʿzir is organized around the calibration of punishment rather than the assessment of injury, the pathway by which a survivor’s harm might be authoritatively established—and thereby made the basis of a compensatory claim—is narrow from the outset. The sections that follow examine what compensation the Code does provide once harm is established, and on what terms.

5.2. Gender-Differentiated Diyya and the Valuation of Bodily Harm

Where sexual violence produces bodily injury for which diyya or arsh is payable, the amount is determined through the tariff reconstructed in the framework above—and that tariff carries the gendered valuation built into its classical form. Under the Islamic Penal Code, the diyya for the killing of a woman is set at half that established for a man (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 550). For injuries to organs and functions, the Code sets a threshold: below one-third of the full diyya, the compensation payable to a woman and a man is equal, and only at or above that threshold is a woman’s diyya reduced to half (art. 560). Arsh, for its part, is in principle assessed without reference to the sex of the injured party, though it is capped by the diyya of the affected organ (art. 562). The valuation of the harm thus depends, at these thresholds, not only on what was done to the body but on whose body it was.

This is the point at which the analysis of the framework becomes concrete. The reduction mandated by Article 560, together with the gender-specific ceiling retained by Article 562, does not arise from any finding that a woman’s injury is less grave, less painful, or less consequential than a man’s; the scale is fixed in advance of any such inquiry. It arises instead from a valuation attached to the injured person prior to the assessment of the particular harm—the structure identified earlier, now visible in codified form. What the Code registers, in the moment of calculation, is not the suffering of the individual before it but her position within a scale settled long beforehand.

The Code does not leave this differential wholly without modification. A provision attached to the diyya rules requires that the difference between the diyya payable to a woman and that payable to a man be met from a public fund rather than by the injured party’s forgoing it (art. 551, note). The significance of that mechanism—what it alters and, more importantly, what it leaves intact—is best assessed once the compensatory provisions specific to sexual violence are in view, and it is taken up in that context below.

5.3. Diyya, Arsh, and Mahr in the Compensation of Sexual Injury

Not every injury has a diyya fixed in advance. Where an injury has no prescribed diyya, the Code provides for arsh, defined as an unquantified compensation whose amount the court determines in light of the nature and effects of the injury and with reference to expert opinion (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 449). Arsh is, in this sense, the codified successor to the classical residual category of assessed compensation: the discretionary valuation that the juristic tradition described as ḥukūmat al-ʿadl enters the modern statute under a new name and with a defined procedure. Its availability means that the absence of a fixed tariff does not leave an injury uncompensated; it shifts the injury into a domain of judicial assessment.

The Code also addresses certain injuries specific to sexual violence, and here precision is essential because the relevant legal categories are legally distinct, even where they arise from the same assault. Efḍāʾ should not be treated as synonymous with rape or with loss of virginity. Under the 2013 Code it denotes a specifically defined bodily injury: the merging of the urinary and vaginal canals, or of the vaginal and anal canals (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 660, note). The Code regulates its compensatory consequences separately according to whether the injured woman is the perpetrator’s spouse or non-spouse (arts. 660–61). Loss of virginity without consent is addressed separately in Article 658, while any additional bodily injury accompanying it attracts a separate diyya or arsh under Article 659. In cases of forcible zina, Article 231 provides mahr al-mithl and, where the woman was a virgin, arsh al-bikāra. A single assault may therefore engage several of these heads at once—depending on the statutory conditions applicable to the case—including full diyya for efḍāʾ, arsh al-bikāra for the loss of virginity, and mahr al-mithl for the intercourse itself, each responding to a legally distinct conception of what was injured.

It is in the character of these heads, rather than in their number, that the framework’s earlier analysis finds its confirmation. Mahr al-mithl is the sum a woman of comparable status would command as dower; arsh al-bikāra prices the loss of virginity as such. Neither measures the psychological, physical, or long-term consequences of the assault for the survivor. What they register is the alteration of her value in a matrix of marriageability and social standing—precisely the relocation of the injury anticipated above, from what was done to her toward what was diminished in her standing to others (Mir-Hosseini and Hamzić 2010). The Code compensates the assault, but the currency in which it does so measures a loss reckoned substantially in relational terms.

This has a consequence beyond the individual heads of compensation. The Code contains no mechanism for rehabilitation, sustained medical or psychological support, or reparation addressed to the non-material dimensions of harm; redress is exhausted by the diyya, arsh, and dower-based sums the doctrinal categories supply. Recognition of injury, where it is available at all, remains bounded by what those categories can register—a limitation that the comparison developed below sets against the multidimensional conception of reparation traced in the international frameworks.

5.4. The Compensation Fund and the Limits of Practical Adjustment

The gender-differentiated tariff described above does not, in its practical operation, leave a woman with half the sum a man would receive. As noted, the note to Article 551 requires that the difference between the diyya payable to a female victim and the male diyya be met from the Bodily Injury Compensation Fund, and the Supreme Court’s Unification Judgment No. 777 confirmed that this obligation extends beyond homicide to injuries to bodily organs and functions (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 551, note; Supreme Court of Iran 2019). In its ultimate effect on the amount received, the mechanism can bring a female victim’s compensation to the level of a male’s.

The reform is significant, and its significance is easily mistaken. What the mechanism adjusts is the sum the victim ultimately receives; what it leaves untouched is the valuation that generates the shortfall in the first place. The perpetrator’s liability continues to be calculated under the gender-differentiated scale; the woman’s diyya remains, in law, reduced at the relevant thresholds; and the equality of the final figure is achieved not by revising that valuation but by having the state supply what the tariff withholds. The differential is not removed—it is absorbed. This distinguishes the Iranian response from the two other modes of engaging the classical rule identified earlier: it is neither a doctrinal revision of the kind argued for within juristic debate, nor a refusal to engage the question, but a third path that leaves the rule formally intact while adjusting its distributive outcome.

The structure of that third path is what makes it analytically revealing. The state does not declare the woman’s injury equal in value; it accepts the classical valuation and then, as a matter of public provision, makes up the difference. Equality of outcome is thereby detached from equality of recognition. In the currency of the tariff—the measure through which the legal system states what the injury is worth—the woman’s body remains valued, at the relevant thresholds, at less than a man’s; the state’s contribution operates alongside that judgment rather than overturning it. The mechanism thus offers a precise illustration of the distinction drawn throughout this article between what a system delivers and what it recognizes: the delivered sum may be equalized while the recognized value is not.

Read against the fifth of the comparative questions—the distance between the norm as stated and the redress as delivered—the Fund occupies an unusual position. In most of the international settings examined above, that distance opened up as a shortfall, a promise of reparation outrunning the resources to fulfil it. Here the relationship is different: the governing norm is itself internally divided, one rule retaining a differentiated valuation while another directs the state to supply the difference. The divergence between norm and delivery is not always a deficit in delivery; it may equally be a division within the norm that delivery is left to mediate.

5.5. Procedural and Social Barriers

The constraints described so far are doctrinal, but they do not operate in isolation from the conditions under which a survivor might actually invoke the law. The evidentiary architecture set out above has a practical corollary: where the threshold for establishing a hadd offence cannot be met, the attempt to prove sexual violence can expose the complainant to jeopardy rather than redress, since an accusation that fails may itself raise the question of consensual conduct. The risk is asymmetric, and it falls on the person seeking recognition of harm. Medico-legal and other evidentiary practices attending such proceedings may themselves be experienced as invasive or as a further violation. The prospect of stigma, shame, diminished social standing, and possible repercussions within the family may operate as a deterrent well before any question of compensation is reached (Asadi et al. 2023).

These barriers compound the structural features analysed in the preceding sections rather than standing apart from them. A framework in which recognition depends on an evidentiary threshold rarely met, in which valuation is attached to the person before the injury and in which redress is exhausted by tariff- and dower-based sums, is one in which access to compensation is constrained at several points at once. Nor does the Code supply the institutional supports—medical, psychological, social—through which other systems seek to make redress reachable in practice. The result is not the absence of compensation but its confinement: available in principle for injuries the doctrinal categories recognize, and difficult to reach for the survivor whose harm, or whose evidentiary position, those categories do not accommodate.

6. Comparative Analysis

6.1. The Terms of Comparison

The preceding sections reconstructed two frameworks, each on its own terms. This section brings them together—not to score one against the other, but to ask the same set of questions of both and to see where their answers diverge. The five questions derived earlier organize the comparison: what each system recognizes as the injury of sexual violence; who holds the claim that the injury generates; by what method the injury is converted into value; what its categories leave outside the frame; and what distance separates the redress each promises from the redress it delivers.

Two features of this procedure follow from the analysis so far and bear restating. The first is that the questions are put symmetrically. The international frameworks are not treated as the yardstick and the Iranian Code as the object measured; each is subjected to the same inquiry. The international order—internally plural and marked, as Section 4 showed, by its own distances between principle and practice—is therefore as much a subject of comparison as the Iranian framework. The second is that divergence at the level of doctrinal provision or practical outcome is not the endpoint of the inquiry. The preceding sections have already identified differences in gender-differentiated valuation, the structure and scope of compensatory categories, and the forms of redress available in the two frameworks. The task here is to explain how those differences are produced by the premises each framework adopts concerning the person, the injury, and the claim. It is at that level, rather than through a tally of remedies, that the comparison becomes most instructive.

6.2. What Is Recognized, and How It Is Valued

The first and third questions—what each system treats as the injury of sexual violence, and by what method it converts that injury into value—are best taken together, because in each framework the answer to one shapes the answer to the other.

The international frameworks, at the level of their stated norms, recognize the injury as multidimensional and assess it through an inquiry into its consequences for the particular person. The harm extends beyond the physical to the psychological and the dignitary, as Aydin affirmed; where reparation is conceived transformatively, as in the Inter-American jurisprudence, the assessment reaches further still, to the structural conditions the injury reflects. The method of valuation is, in principle, responsive to the injury as experienced—though, as Section 4 showed, that individualized inquiry is unevenly realized and places its own demands on the survivor.

The Iranian framework proceeds differently, and the difference must be stated with precision, because it operates across three distinct levels that are easily collapsed. At the level of the underlying tariff, the valuation is gender-differentiated at defined thresholds: for injuries reaching one-third of the full diyya, a woman’s diyya is half a man’s, and arsh, though assessed without direct gender differentiation, is capped by the gendered diyya of the affected organ (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, arts. 550, 560, 562). At the level of the perpetrator’s liability, the sum owed is calculated on this differentiated scale. At the level of the amount ultimately received, the Compensation Fund supplies the difference, so that the total reaching the woman may equal a man’s (art. 551, note; Supreme Court of Iran 2019). The valuation is therefore not reducible to the proposition that women receive less; it is that the injury is priced, at the level where the law states what it is worth, according to a scale settled in advance of the particular harm and keyed in part to the person of the victim—a valuation the state then supplements without revising.

Set side by side, the two answers reveal the deeper divergence the framework anticipated. It is not principally that one system values women’s injuries at half and the other does not, for the Fund complicates any such statement, and the Iranian system retains an individualized assessment of its own in arsh. It is that the assessment each performs does different work: in the international frameworks, an inquiry that reconstructs the consequences of the violation for the particular person; in the Iranian framework, the placement of the injury within categories and measures substantially settled in advance. The one begins from the person’s experience and reasons toward a value; the other begins from a scale and locates the person within it. Each method has its own virtue—the calculability and consistency of the Iranian approach, the responsiveness to experienced harm of the international one—and its own cost.

6.3. Who Holds the Claim, and to What End

The second question asks who holds the claim that sexual violence generates—who is entitled to pursue it, to settle it, or to let it go—and it is here that the two frameworks diverge sharply in structure while converging in a difficulty neither escapes.

In the Iranian framework, the compensatory entitlement arising from the injury—mahr al-mithl, arsh al-bikāra, diyya, or arsh—belongs to the injured party, who may pursue it, settle it, or forgo it; the penal response to forcible zina, classified as a hadd offence, is not hers to bargain away (Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, arts. 231, 448–49). This vesting of the compensatory claim in the individual treats the person harmed as the holder of the entitlement rather than as a witness to a wrong done to the public order. Yet the same structure carries a cost that bears directly on sexual violence. Where the entitlement is private, its pursuit becomes subject to conditions the survivor does not control—conditions in which familial and social pressure, examined earlier, operate directly on whether and how the claim is exercised. The autonomy the structure confers and the vulnerability it creates are aspects of a single design.

The international frameworks locate the claim differently, and not uniformly among themselves. Before the regional human rights courts, the survivor proceeds as an applicant against the state, alleging its failure to prevent, investigate, or redress; before the International Criminal Court, the reparative claim is, as Section 4 showed, downstream of the prosecution and conviction of an individual perpetrator. The criminal-law route in particular secures something the private-right model does not—a recognition of sexual violence as a public wrong of the gravest order, not a matter for private settlement—but it exacts its own price. The survivor’s access to recognition runs through a process directed at the conviction of a perpetrator, in which her injury is established to the extent, and in the terms, that the prosecution requires. This is the point at which the critique of carceral feminism, raised at the outset, returns to the comparison (Halley et al. 2006; Engle 2020). The concern that animated it—that aligning the recognition of women’s harm with the punitive machinery of the state may subordinate the survivor’s interests to purposes not her own—is not a critique of the Iranian system from the standpoint of the international one. It applies, in different form, to both. The Iranian framework can subordinate the survivor’s claim to the interests of those around her; the prosecutorial route can subordinate it to the imperatives of conviction.

Posed symmetrically, then, the question of who holds the claim yields not a contrast between a system that empowers survivors and one that does not, but a set of structures each of which recognizes the survivor in one respect and displaces her in another. The Iranian model makes her the holder of the compensatory claim but exposes its exercise to the pressures around her; the prosecutorial model makes her harm a public wrong but routes its recognition through an apparatus with purposes of its own. Neither resolves the question its structure raises, and the difference between them lies in which purposes the survivor’s claim is made to serve, not in whether it is made to serve purposes beyond her own.

6.4. Norm and Delivery, and the Range of Islamic Responses

The fifth question—what distance separates the redress a framework promises from the redress it delivers—operates differently in the two settings, and the difference is easy to misdescribe. Across the international mechanisms examined here, though to varying degrees and through different institutional routes, the characteristic problem is a variable gap between an expansive reparative norm and its incomplete delivery: the multidimensional promise of the Basic Principles, the transformative ambition of the Inter-American jurisprudence, and the reparative orders of the ICC all outrun, in practice, the resources and institutions available to fulfil them. The norm reaches beyond what is delivered. In the Iranian framework, the relationship runs otherwise. What confronts a woman seeking compensation for bodily injury is not, or not principally, a shortfall in the delivery of an equality norm, but a norm that is itself internally divided: one rule retains a gender-differentiated valuation, while another requires the state to supply the difference. The gap here is not between norm and delivery but within the norm itself.

The Supreme Court’s Unification Judgment No. 777 is where this internal division becomes visible, and it repays reading as more than a technical ruling. The judgment does not revise the differentiated tariff or the perpetrator’s liability calculated upon it; it directs that the difference be met from the Compensation Fund, and it grounds that direction in the beneficent (emtenāni) character of the provision, construing it broadly so as to extend across offences against women (Supreme Court of Iran 2019). At the level of legal design, this is a determinate legal choice rather than merely a failure to implement an equality norm: the law directs that the final amount be equalized through supplementation while declining to state that the injury itself is equally valued.

Seen in this light, the Iranian response is one solution among several that contemporary Muslim-majority jurisdictions have reached for the same tension between a classical rule of differentiated valuation and contemporary equality norms—and setting them side by side guards against treating any one as the measure of the others. Pakistan’s Penal Code adopts a statutory route: its provisions establish a common measure of diyat and calculate specified forms of arsh by reference to it, without expressly differentiating the amount according to the sex of the victim (Pakistan 1860, ss. 323, 337-Q–337-V; see generally Wasti 2009). Within juristic reasoning itself, the differential has been directly contested: the Sunni debate surrounding Qaraḍāwī’s fatwa and the Imami arguments advanced by Ṣāniʿī both challenge the rule at the level of its doctrinal foundations rather than its practical effects (Shaham 2021; Ṣāniʿī 2011; Rad Goudarzi 2021). Iran’s Unification Judgment represents a third route: it leaves the doctrinal rule untouched and neutralizes part of its distributive effect through a state mechanism. These are not stages on a single path from tradition toward reform, but distinct legal responses—legislative reform, juristic revision, and state-funded supplementation—to a tension each jurisdiction confronts in its own institutional terms. That the same tension is worked out in such different ways is itself evidence against the image of a monolithic and static Islamic legal order, an image the comparison developed here has resisted throughout.

6.5. Synthesis

Examined through the five questions, the two frameworks differ less in the adequacy of their answers than in the premises from which their answers proceed. On what is recognized as injury and how it is valued, the international mechanisms begin from the assessed consequences of the violation for the person, the Iranian framework from legally specified categories into which the injury is placed; but neither reduces to the other’s caricature, since the Iranian system retains an individualized assessment in arsh and the international promise is frequently narrowed in practice. On who holds the claim, each framework recognizes the survivor in one respect and displaces her in another—the one vesting the entitlement in her while exposing its exercise to the pressures around her, the other treating her harm as a public wrong while routing its recognition through an apparatus with purposes of its own. And on the distance between norm and delivery, the two are not even instances of the same problem: where the international mechanisms characteristically promise more than they deliver, the Iranian framework legally provides for an equalized sum while declining, at the level of the governing norm, to value the injury equally.

What the comparison yields, then, is not a ranking but a map of two ways of constituting the same injury as a legal object.

Table 1. The compensation of sexual violence under international frameworks and the Iranian Islamic Penal Code, compared across five analytical questions.

Question	International Frameworks	Iranian Islamic Penal Code
What is recognized as injury?	Physical, psychological, and dignitary harm; in its transformative form, the structural conditions of the violation	Injury as classified within codified doctrinal categories; compensable harm defined by those categories
How is the injury valued?	Predominantly by individualized assessment of consequences for the person	By an antecedent tariff (diyya) keyed to classification and status; judicial assessment (arsh) determined with reference to the statutory diyya framework
Who holds the claim?	Varies by mechanism: victim-initiated against the state (regional courts); reparation downstream of prosecution (ICC)	The survivor holds the compensatory entitlement; the penal response is not hers to settle
What is left outside the frame?	Non-material and structural harm often unrealized in delivery; recognition mediated by prosecutorial or jurisdictional requirements	Within the IPC’s compensatory scheme, rehabilitative, psychological, and long-term dimensions not addressed by the doctrinal categories
What separates norm from delivery?	A variable gap: the reparative norm reaches beyond available resources and institutions	Not a shortfall but an internally divided norm: a differentiated tariff supplemented by a state fund

summarizes the divergence between the two frameworks across the five analytical questions. It is offered not as a scorecard on which one column is preferable in every row, but as a synopsis of where, and why, the two frameworks part company.

7. Implications for Legal Reform and Comparative Analysis

The analysis to this point has been explanatory rather than prescriptive; but the account it yields carries implications for how reform of the Iranian framework might be conceived, and for the terms on which the international frameworks can serve as a resource for it.

Unification Judgment No. 777 is instructive beyond its immediate holding, because it demonstrates a mode of change available within the existing structure. Without displacing the differentiated underlying rule, the Court used an expansive construction of the statutory scheme and state-funded supplementation to neutralize part of its unequal distributive effect (Supreme Court of Iran 2019; Islamic Republic of Iran 2013, art. 551, note); the same logic could in principle extend to other domains in which gendered valuations produce unequal outcomes. Yet the limits of this route are as instructive as its possibility. It corrects the amount received while leaving intact the valuation that produces the shortfall, and in doing so it shifts the burden of the difference from the perpetrator to the public purse—altering, in the process, the meaning of the recognition that compensation is supposed to carry. Equalization achieved by state supplement is not the same as equal valuation, and a reform that stopped at the former would leave the underlying conception of the injury untouched. The judgment shows that gradual, internally generated adjustment is possible; it also shows that such adjustment reaches the distribution of the remedy more readily than the premises that structure it.

This suggests that reform framed solely as the equalization of monetary awards would address only one level of the problem the comparison brings into view. The five questions locate the constraints on redress at several points at once: in the gendered valuation of harm, in the confinement of compensable injury to what the doctrinal categories can classify, and in the practical and social conditions under which an entitlement is exercised. A reform responsive to all three would need to revise the valuation rule, to widen the recognized injury beyond classifiable bodily harm toward its psychological, dignitary, and long-term dimensions, and to secure the conditions—procedural and institutional—under which a survivor can actually reach the redress the law provides. Equality in the sum reached matters, but it does not by itself convert a tariff-based conception of bodily injury into a framework capable of registering the full harm of sexual violence.

The international frameworks supply resources for that widening—a developed vocabulary of multidimensional and transformative reparation, and a body of jurisprudence recognizing psychological and structural harm (UN General Assembly 2005; Ní Aoláin et al. 2015). But the analysis cautions against importing them as a finished template. As Section 4 and Section 6.3 demonstrated, several of these mechanisms tie reparation to criminal proceedings, jurisdictional reach, or institutional priorities that survivors do not control, and the critique of carceral feminism applies to them as much as to any domestic system (Halley et al. 2006; Engle 2020): an expansion of punishment or prosecution does not, in itself, secure a survivor’s access to redress, and a reform that folded compensation into an increasingly punitive apparatus might displace the very agency the private-right structure, for all its exposure to social pressure, at least formally preserves. The comparative analysis therefore supports neither the preservation of the Iranian framework as it stands nor the wholesale transplantation of international models. It points instead toward a survivor-oriented reform that combines equal valuation, a broader recognition of harm, and effective access to redress without making compensation dependent upon an increasingly punitive response.

The implication is not that compensation can replace criminal accountability, but that neither punishment nor formal equality in monetary awards should be mistaken for adequate redress. A reparative framework must ask not only how the violation is classified and sanctioned, but what the survivor has lost, what she requires, and which institutions can deliver it without displacing her agency.

8. Conclusions

This article set out to examine how compensation for sexual violence is structured under the Iranian Islamic Penal Code and how it stands in relation to the international law of reparation. Its central claim has been that the divergence between them is not, at bottom, a matter of one system providing more or less than the other, but of the two constituting the injury of sexual violence as a legal object in different ways. Compensation, on this account, does not simply respond to a harm given in advance; it participates in determining what counts as harm, how that harm is known, and in what currency it can be repaid. To compare two compensation regimes is therefore to compare two epistemologies of harm.

Read through that lens, the differences traced across the preceding sections fall into place. Where the international frameworks of reparation, at the level of their stated norms, assess the injury through its consequences for the person, the Iranian framework values it through legal categories and measures substantially settled in advance of the particular harm; where the international mechanisms variously route the survivor’s claim through proceedings against the state or through a public criminal process, the Iranian framework vests the compensatory claim in the injured party while exposing its exercise to the pressures around her. These are not positions on a single scale of adequacy. They are different answers to the prior question of what the injury is and whose loss it represents—answers in which distinct conceptions of the person, the body, and their value are made concrete.

Holding to that level of analysis has a further consequence, which the comparison has borne out at every turn: neither framework emerges as the simple measure of the other. The international order is internally plural and marked by its own distance between an expansive promise and a constrained delivery; its survivor-centered vocabulary carries, in the critique of carceral feminism, an unresolved tension of its own. The Iranian framework, for its part, is neither static nor monolithic—its gendered valuations are contested within juristic reasoning and their distributive effects are mitigated, if incompletely, through state-funded supplementation. What the comparison offers is thus not a verdict but an account: of the Iranian framework and the international mechanisms each constituting the harm of sexual violence through its own categories, and each recognizing the survivor in some respects while displacing her in others.

In foregrounding these dynamics, the article contributes to the scholarship on gender, reparation, and Islamic criminal law less by cataloguing the divergence between Iranian and international law than by relocating the question. The issue is not only whether remedies are available or adequate, but how, at the prior stage of recognition, a legal system decides what the injury of sexual violence is and what it is worth. Access to compensation is constrained not merely at the point of delivery but also at the point of definition—and it is there, in the quiet work of translating harm into legal value, that the conditions under which suffering becomes a claim are ultimately set.