On the eve of International Women’s Day, Amnesty International announced in a statement that Iranian authorities have launched a “large-scale and draconian campaign” to enforce compulsory veiling laws through surveillance, confiscating vehicles, and humiliating citizens.
Amnesty International, on March 6, released a press statement stating that this campaign is being conducted through “widespread surveillance of women and girls in public spaces and mass police checks targeting women drivers.”
“Tens of thousands of women have had their cars arbitrarily confiscated as punishment for defying Iran’s veiling laws. Others have been prosecuted and sentenced to flogging or prison terms or faced other penalties such as fines or being forced to attend ‘morality’ classes,” the statement added.
The report is based on testimonies from 46 individuals – 41 women, one girl and four men – collected by Amnesty International in February 2024
This human rights organization states that, in preparing this report, they have reviewed “official documents including court verdicts and prosecution orders, indicate that a plethora of state agencies are involved in persecuting women and girls for simply exercising their rights to bodily autonomy and freedom of expression and belief.”
Amnesty International reviewed screenshots of 60 such text messages issued over the past year to 22 women and men.
“Amnesty International spoke to 11 women who described intimidating car chases and stops and sudden impoundments while going about their ordinary daily activities such as commuting to work, medical visits or school runs. They emphasized the police’s complete disregard for their safety, with some women left stranded on busy highways or in cities far from their hometown,” the report added.
“Women and men said that the process to retrieve their cars from the Moral Security Police involves long queues and degrading treatment from officials including gender-based insults and reprimands about the appearance of women and girls as young as nine as well as humiliating instructions to cover their hair and threats of flogging, imprisonment and travel bans.”
Women and girls faced humiliating instructions to cover their hair and threats of flogging, imprisonment and travel bans according to the report.
“One woman also told the organization about an incident in late 2023 where an enforcer at a metro station in Tehran punched her 21-year-old cousin in the chest,” Amnesty said in its report.
“A 17-year-old girl told Amnesty International that her school principal temporarily suspended her after a CCTV camera captured her unveiled in a classroom, and threatened to report her to the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards if she removed her headscarf again.”
Amnesty International’s press statement notes that determining the extent of such judicial persecutions is challenging because authorities refrain from releasing relevant statistics.
However, statements by Mohammad Reza Mirheidari, the commander of the police force in Qom province in January 2024, regarding 1986 legal cases related to compulsory veiling only in that province since the beginning of 2023, indicate that such cases have not been widely reported.
“One woman told Amnesty International that a judge pointed to a pile of some 30 or 40 cases on his desk, commenting that they were all related to compulsory veiling,” according to the report. “Several other women said that prosecution and police officials lamented their heavy workload due to women’s resistance against compulsory veiling.”
“In January 2024, the authorities implemented a flogging sentence of 74 lashes against Roya Heshmati for appearing unveiled in public. In a testimony on her social media account, she recounted her flogging by a male official in the presence of a judge in a room she described as a ‘medieval torture chamber’.”
Following extensive protests that began last year and resulted in the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini while in the custody of the Morality Police, there has been a significant increase in the number of women and girls refraining from wearing the compulsory veiling in Iran as a form of civil protest.
