Human Trafficking in Iran: Laws, Victims, and U.S. Sanctions

Human trafficking in Iran takes three main forms: sex trafficking of Iranian women and girls, forced labor of migrants and children, and coerced military recruitment of Afghan and Pakistani nationals by state security forces. The U.S. State Department has placed Iran on Tier 3, its lowest ranking, in every recent Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report, finding that the government neither meets minimum standards nor makes significant efforts to do so.¹ For readers outside Iran, the practical questions are what U.S. sanctions and criminal laws reach this conduct, and where to report it.

How Trafficking Operates Inside Iran

Sex trafficking affects Iranian women and girls exploited at home and moved abroad. Traffickers commonly use fraudulent marriage proposals as a recruitment tool. Iran’s legal institution of temporary marriage, sigheh, compounds the problem: under Iranian civil law a man can contract a marriage lasting as little as an hour, with no obligation of financial support and no requirement for divorce. Traffickers and sex tourists use these arrangements, sometimes booked alongside hotel reservations in religious tourism cities, to give a legal veneer to commercial sexual exploitation. Women who try to leave face prosecution for adultery.¹

Forced labor runs through construction, brick kilns, agriculture, and domestic service. Undocumented Afghan migrants are the most exploited group, held in place by debt bondage, wage theft, and the threat of deportation. Children, both Iranian and Afghan, are forced into organized begging and street vending, with criminal networks using physical abuse and deliberate drug addiction to maintain control.

Iran also functions as a transit corridor. Victims from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other South Asian countries move through Iranian territory on the way to Turkey, Europe, or the Gulf, often along the same routes used for undocumented migration.

Who Is Most at Risk

Several million Afghans live in Iran, many without legal documentation, and they form the largest at-risk population. The threat of arrest and deportation becomes the trafficker’s primary tool of control, making victims afraid to approach police. Children of undocumented Afghans face additional barriers to obtaining papers, which raises their vulnerability from an early age.¹

Women and girls are recruited through deceptive marriage proposals that lead to domestic servitude or sexual exploitation. Married women under economic pressure are also targeted and then kept in prostitution by traffickers who use the threat of adultery prosecution as leverage.

State-Sponsored Recruitment by the IRGC

The most documented form of trafficking tied directly to the Iranian state involves the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its coerced recruitment of Afghan and Pakistani nationals into militia forces deployed to Syria. The Fatemiyoun Division, composed of Afghans, and the Zaynabiyoun Brigade, composed of Pakistanis, were built largely through coerced recruitment from refugee and migrant populations inside Iran. Former fighters have described being arrested by Iranian security forces and given a choice between prison, deportation, or “volunteering” to fight in Syria in exchange for promised legal residency. Children as young as 14 were recruited under the same conditions.²

The 2025 TIP Report found that IRGC recruitment and use of child soldiers continued through the most recent reporting period, and that the government was also complicit in child soldier recruitment by non-state armed groups, including the Houthis in Yemen.¹

What Iranian Law Says and Where It Fails

Iran’s anti-trafficking framework rests on a 2004 anti-trafficking law, a 2020 child protection law, and provisions in the labor code. All three have significant gaps.

The 2004 law criminalizes trafficking involving force, coercion, abuse of power, or exploitation of vulnerability for purposes of prostitution, slavery, or forced marriage. Penalties reach up to 10 years’ imprisonment for trafficking of adults and a fixed 10-year sentence when the victim is a child. The law requires physical movement as an element of the crime, inconsistent with the international definition, and requires proof of force, fraud, or coercion even in child sex trafficking cases. It also does not cover all forms of labor trafficking. An amendment addressing some of these deficiencies received approval of its general provisions by parliament in October 2024 but remained pending final approval as of the most recent reporting period.¹

The 2020 Law on Protection of Children and Adolescents criminalized the buying, selling, and exploitation of children, but set penalties at only six months to one year of imprisonment plus a fine, which international observers have called neither stringent nor proportional to comparable crimes.¹ The labor code prohibits forced labor and debt bondage, with penalties of 91 days to one year of imprisonment plus a fine, considered insufficient to deter large-scale forced labor in industries like construction and brick production.

How the Iranian System Treats Victims

The gap between statute and enforcement is where the system fails most completely. The government has reported no statistics on trafficking investigations, prosecutions, or convictions to international monitors. There are no specialized anti-trafficking police units and no standardized training on victim identification, and officials routinely conflate trafficking with migrant smuggling, treating a victim protection issue as an immigration enforcement problem.¹

Trafficking cases fall under the jurisdiction of Iran’s Revolutionary Courts rather than the general criminal courts, with fewer procedural protections. Courts also give women’s legal testimony half the weight of men’s, which undermines female victims trying to seek accountability against exploiters.³

Iran also actively punishes victims. Women forced into prostitution face prosecution for adultery, which can carry a death sentence, along with lashing, public shaming, forced confessions, and imprisonment. Undocumented migrants who are trafficking victims face detention and deportation rather than identification and assistance. Afghan children who refused coerced military recruitment by the IRGC have been detained and deported. The government has not reported any proactive effort to identify trafficking victims for at least eight consecutive years, and no formal identification or referral procedures exist.¹

Official complicity is structural rather than incidental. Beyond the IRGC role, officials at various levels have been reported to perpetrate and condone trafficking crimes with impunity, and the government has never reported efforts to hold complicit officials accountable. Iranian authorities reportedly arrested 96 individuals for alleged sex trafficking in April 2024, but no follow-up on prosecutions or convictions was made available.¹

U.S. Sanctions Reaching Iranian Trafficking Actors

The United States has layered sanctions over Iranian entities and officials tied to serious human rights abuses, including trafficking. Executive Order 13553 authorizes the Treasury Department to block the property of Iranian government officials responsible for or complicit in serious human rights abuses against people in Iran. The order initially designated senior IRGC commanders and intelligence officials by name, and the Secretary of the Treasury can add individuals who meet the criteria.⁴

Treasury has separately designated the Fatemiyoun Division and the Zaynabiyoun Brigade under both counter-terrorism authorities and the human rights provisions of E.O. 13553, citing their role in preying on Afghan and Pakistani refugees and migrants, including children.²

For U.S. persons and businesses, these designations carry concrete consequences. All property and interests in property of designated individuals and entities within the United States or controlled by U.S. persons are blocked. Transactions with blocked persons are prohibited unless specifically authorized by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Any entity owned 50 percent or more by a blocked person is also blocked. Violations can trigger significant civil and criminal penalties under federal law.⁴

Federal Criminal Penalties That Can Reach Iranian Trafficking

U.S. federal law reaches trafficking conduct extraterritorially in certain circumstances. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1589, anyone who provides or obtains the labor of another person through force, threats, or abuse of law or legal process faces up to 20 years in federal prison. If the trafficking results in death, or involves kidnapping or aggravated sexual abuse, the sentence can extend to life imprisonment.⁵ These penalties apply to U.S. persons involved in trafficking networks regardless of where the conduct occurs and can reach foreign nationals whose trafficking activities have a sufficient connection to the United States.

Where to Report Suspected Trafficking

In an emergency, call 911. For non-emergency reporting of suspected trafficking connected to Iran or Iranian networks:

DHS/ICE Homeland Security Investigations Tip Line: 1-866-347-2423, available 24/7. International callers: 1-802-872-6199. Online tips at ice.gov/tips.
FBI: tips.fbi.gov or a local FBI field office.
State Department Diplomatic Security Service: TraffickingTips@state.gov, especially for cases involving visa fraud or diplomatic personnel.
National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888. This hotline is operated by a nongovernmental organization funded by the federal government and is not a law enforcement authority.

The HSI tip line is the most direct route for suspected international trafficking, as Homeland Security Investigations leads federal efforts against transnational trafficking networks.⁶

1
United States Department of State. 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Iran
2
U.S. Department of the Treasury. Treasury Designates Iran’s Foreign Fighter Militias in Syria along with a Civilian Airline Ferrying Weapons to Syria
3
United States Department of State. 2017 Trafficking in Persons Report: Iran
4
eCFR. Part 562 – Iranian Sector and Human Rights Abuses Sanctions Regulations
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 1589 – Forced Labor
6
United States Department of State. Domestic Trafficking Hotlines