Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri has announced that the country’s parliament and court were reconsidering the law that mandates women wear the hijab in public.
While state media downplayed an official’s assertion that Iran’s much-feared morality police squad had been “abolished” in the face of continued protests, the said official has added that the legislation requiring women to wear the hijab mandatorily is being reviewed.
According to the reformist news outlet Entekhab, Montazeri stated the hijab laws were under review. On Saturday, he was quoted as saying that Iran’s morality police had been “abolished.” However, official Iranian media vehemently fought against this claim, claiming that the interior ministry, not the judiciary, is responsible for the morality police.
CNN has requested a comment from the Ministry of the Interior.
In Iran, the so-called “morality police” enforce the country’s strict Islamic law, which requires all women to wear a headscarf in public. A worldwide protest movement was triggered by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was jailed by the morality police for reportedly not wearing her hijab correctly.
Her untimely passing on September 16 struck a chord in the Islamic Republic, and many notable figures have supported the cause since then, including acclaimed Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti.
A wave of massive protests, sparked by the killing of Amini but now including a wide variety of complaints against the leadership, has engulfed the country. There have been claims of forced detentions and physical abuse by authorities, specifically directed against the country’s Kurdish minority community, as part of a deadly crackdown on demonstrators.
Since the beginning of the turmoil, CNN has been investigating allegations of sexual abuse against demonstrators, including boys, in Iran’s detention camps.
Montazeri was quoted by state-affiliated media ISNA on Thursday saying, “We know you feel anguished when you witness [women] without a hijab in cities, do you think the officials are silent about it? Think the officials are silent about it? As someone who is in the field of this issue, I say that both the parliament and the judiciary are working, for example, just yesterday we had a meeting with the cultural commission of the parliament, and you will see the results within the next week or two.”
The law, which was implemented following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been in existence since then, but there is no indication of whether or not it will be changed.
When asked by a reporter on Saturday if the morality police will be dismantled, Montazeri reportedly said, “Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary. It was abolished from the same place it was launched. Of course, the judiciary will continue to monitor society’s behaviour.”
Arab-language State-run Al-Alam TV said that Montazeri’s words were being misinterpreted as “a retreat on the side of the Islamic Republic from its stance on hijab and religious morality as a result of the protests” by the international press, when in fact all that could be gleaned from them was that the morality police were not tied directly to the judiciary.
Al-Alam claimed on Sunday that there had been no confirmation of the closure of the Guidance Patrol from any authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In light of the recent unrest, “Some foreign media have attempted to interpret these words by the prosecutor-general as the Islamic Republic retreating from the issue of Hijab and modesty and claim that it is due to the recent riots,” the author wrote.
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