As anti-hijab protests continue, Iran has scrapped its morality police on Sunday. The decision was taken after more than two months of protests triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly violating the country’s strict female dress code.
The protests began in mid-September and witnessed clashes, and killings of demonstrators in large numbers. Arab News recently reported citing a human rights group that Iranian Security Forces have killed at least 448 people in a crackdown on protests held in Iran.
The protests in Iran erupted after Mahsa Amini was taken into custody by Iran’s morality police on 16 September for wearing an ‘inappropriate’ headscarf, and later died, drawing allegations of custodial violence. Demonstrators have burned their mandatory hijab head coverings and shouted anti-government slogans, and since Amini’s death, a growing number of women have failed to wear the hijab, particularly in parts of Tehran.
“Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished”, Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
The announcement of the units’ abolition came a day after Montazeri said “both parliament and the judiciary are working” on the issue of whether the law requiring women to cover their heads needs to be changed.
Raisi said in televised comments Saturday that Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched “but there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible”.
According to Norway’s Iran Human Rights group, 60 of the 448 verified fatalities were minors under 18, including nine girls. Another 29 victims were women. According to the report, security personnel have murdered 16 people in the past week alone, 12 of them were killed in Kurdish-populated areas where demonstrations have been particularly violent. Apart from India, Malaysia, Indonesia, UAE and Khakhastan had also abstained from the resolution. Meanwhile, Pakistan and China rejected the resolution.