After a series of fiery protests, Iran is reportedly abolishing its morality police and may loosen requirements on wearing hijabs, the country’s attorney general confirmed on Saturday.
Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said at a press conference that the morality police have “nothing to do with the judiciary and have been abolished.”
“Of course, the judiciary continues to monitor behavioral actions,” he added. The Iranian authorities will consider whether to adjust the headscarf rules, the attorney general said in a statement.
Born after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the religious force, charged with patrolling for and arresting women who violate the Islamic dress code, e.g., by not wearing a head covering or loose-fitting clothing, has existed outside of the judicial system, operated by law enforcement.
The mass unrest that has swept the country in recent months was triggered by the arrest of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran for not wearing the mandated hijab headscarf. After she was escorted to a police station, the woman went into a coma and later died in a hospital. While the official state account contends that Amini suffered a fatal heart attack, eyewitnesses claim that several security officers assaulted her in the police van following her detention.
Amini’s death fueled a wave of anti-regime rallies pressuring the theocracy to relax its restrictions. Mostly women and young adults, including many university students, have participated, urging an overhaul of the fundamentalist religious dictates. In a show of resistance, protesters have marched in the streets yelling slogans like “woman, life, freedom,” burned their hijabs, and cut their hair, the New York Times reported. Some protesters have called for the end of the Islamic Republic. In late November, an Iranian general acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the ongoing demonstrations.
The authoritarian regime in Tehran retaliated to the challenge to its rule with a crackdown, jailing many protesters on national-security and public-order charges and threatening some with execution. In November, a court in Iran issued the first death sentence to a rioter who set a government facility on fire. The person was pronounced guilty of “enmity against God,” according to the BBC.