قرچک

What it is

قرچک (Qarchak) is a women’s prison in Varamin, south of Tehran. The site started life as a poultry farm and was converted by the judiciary into a detention facility around 2010, expanded in 2012 when the women political prisoners then held in Evin‘s Ward 350 were transferred there. The facility’s official name is “Shahr-e Rey Women’s Prison” (zendân-e zanân-e Shahr-e Rey). Iranians call it Qarchak after the village.

The prison holds approximately 2,000-3,000 women at any time, depending on the year, in capacity originally rated at half that. Inmates are mixed: women convicted of murder, drug offenses, and ordinary crimes are housed alongside political prisoners, women’s-rights activists, journalists, and women detained on hijab-related charges.

The mechanics

Survivor accounts and Amnesty International reporting document a consistent set of conditions: contaminated drinking water (the local supply runs through industrial land), severe overcrowding (eight bunks in cells designed for four), denial of cancer treatment and other medical care, hot summers without functional cooling, lice and bedbug infestations. The deliberate mixing of political prisoners with violent offenders is part of the design. Several Iranian human-rights monitors describe it as a punishment intensifier: a writer or a women’s-rights organizer is placed in a cell with women serving long sentences for violent crimes, in conditions that compound the sentence.

Qarchak held Sepideh Qoliyân (the labor activist who covered the Haft Tappeh sugar workers’ strike), Atena Daemi, Saba Kord-Afshari, the journalist Niloofar Hâmedi at one transfer point, and many of the women detained in the post-Mahsa protest wave.

Sanctions and designations

The US Treasury sanctioned Qarchak Prison and its director, Soghra Khodadadi, on 9 May 2018 under Executive Order 13553 (human-rights abuses in Iran). The designation specifically cited the prison’s “harsh conditions” and Khodadadi’s “responsibility for serious human rights abuses.” This was one of the first US sanctions packages to designate a specific Iranian prison facility, alongside Evin.

The European Union has sanctioned individual Qarchak officials. Amnesty International issued a 2021 urgent action on the medical-care denial pattern. The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran has cited Qarchak repeatedly in annual reports.

In our voice

The conversion of a poultry farm into a women’s prison is not a metaphor for how the Iranian state thinks about female political prisoners. It is the literal real-estate decision that shapes the daily lives of thousands of women. We document the design choice because the regime has worked hard to keep Qarchak’s conditions out of the international press, and because the women who survive their sentences come out and tell people, and we want learners reading those testimonies to recognize the place by name.

Why it’s in this glossary

Qarchak comes up in every account of the post-2022 protest detention wave, in every report on Iranian women’s-rights prisoners, and in every Amnesty urgent action about Iran’s prison system. A learner who only knows اوین will miss half the geography of Iranian political detention. We keep them as paired entries.

How to use it

• منتقلش کردن قرچک (montaqelesh kardan qarchak) “they transferred her to Qarchak”
• تو زندان قرچک نگهداری میشه (tu zendân-e qarchak negahdâri mishe) “she’s being held in Qarchak Prison”
• شرایط قرچک خیلی بده (sharâyet-e qarchak kheyli bade) “the conditions in Qarchak are terrible”

References

• US Treasury sanctions on Qarchak Prison and its director, 9 May 2018
• Amnesty International on women prisoners’ conditions, April 2021
• IranWire reporting on Qarchak conditions
• Human Rights Watch, World Report 2024
• Dehkhoda, قرچک