Iran’s parliament and courts are considering a law requiring women to cover their heads, which has sparked more than two months of deadly protests, the attorney general has said.
The protests began on September 16 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish origin, days after her arrest by Iranian morality police for allegedly breaking the dress code.
Demonstrators chanted anti-government slogans and female protesters burned their headdresses. After Amini’s death, more and more women, especially in northern Tehran, do not wear the hijab.
“Parliament and the courts decide” whether the law should be changed, Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said Friday in the holy city of Como. He was quoted by the ISNA news agency.
However, he did not specify what the Tory-controlled authorities might change in the law.
The review team met with members of parliament’s culture committee on Wednesday and “will have the results in a week or two”, the attorney general said.
President Ebrahim Raisi said on Saturday that the foundations of the Iranian republic and of Islam are enshrined in the constitution.
“But there are ways of implementing the constitution that can be flexible,” he said on television.
In April 1983, four years after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed Shah, the hijab became compulsory for all Iranian women.
In a country where conservatives insist that wearing the hijab is compulsory and reformists prefer to leave it to personal choice, this remains a very sensitive issue.
Hundreds of dead
After the hijab law became mandatory, the dress code changed and it became common to see women wearing tight jeans and loose, colorful scarves.
Yet in July this year, the ultra-conservative E. Raisi called for the mobilization of “all state institutions to implement the headgear law”.
However, many women continue to bend the rules.
In September, Iran’s main reform party called for the repeal of the compulsory hijab law.
The Islamic People’s Party of Iran alliance, formed by relatives of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, demanded on Saturday that the authorities “prepare the legal elements which will allow the repeal of the compulsory hijab law”.
The opposition group also calls on the Shia republic to “officially declare the end of the moral police” and “allow peaceful protests”, it said in a statement.
Iran accuses its implacable enemies, the United States and allies such as the United Kingdom and Israel, as well as Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fueling the unrest, which the government calls “riots”. “.
A general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said for the first time this week that more than 300 people had been killed in the unrest since Amini’s death.
At the time, the Supreme National Security Council said on Saturday that the death toll in the protests “passed 200”.
State news agency IRNA said the figure included security officials, civilians, armed separatists and “rioters”.
The Oslo-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) said on Tuesday that “at least 448 people have been killed by security forces” during protests across the country.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said last week that 14,000 people, including children, had been arrested in connection with the crackdown on protests.
The Supreme National Security Council said the violence not only cost lives, but also caused billions of rials (millions of euros) in damage.
Source: The Delfi
