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Iran’s so-called morality police unit, whose actions sparked months of protests, has been suspended, a senior Iranian official said Sunday — though the force’s status remains uncertain.
The protest movement began in September after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s Guidance Patrol, who arrested her for allegedly violating the country’s conservative dress code for women. Family members and activists say she was beaten to death and accused the government of a cover-up. authorities deny.
More than 400 people have been killed and more than 15,000 arrested in a crackdown on demonstrations that have escalated into widespread calls to overthrow Iran’s religious leaders, according to human rights groups. Given the strict censorship and restrictions on reporting, the full extent of the casualties is difficult to gauge.
The disbanding of the force responsible for enforcing compulsory hijab, albeit nominal, would indicate an unprecedented level of response to protesters’ demands. However, experts warned that statements made by Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri in response to questions at a press conference should be taken with some skepticism.
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“The morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary, and they were abolished by those who created them,” Montazeri said Saturday during a conspiracy theory-laden speech that blamed Western countries and state-backed Iranian media for the anti-government unrest held responsible have been reported. “But of course the judiciary will continue to monitor behavior in society.”
He appeared to be referring to the relative absence of vice squads on the streets since protests against Iran’s religious leaders erupted. An app the Iranians originally used to track roaming patrols has instead been used to monitor and evade security forces in recent weeks.
But Montazeri’s statements, which asserted that morality police were not within the purview of the judiciary, were not official endorsement of the dissolution, which would require higher-level approval.
Montazeri’s “statement should not be read as final,” said Sanam Vakil, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank. No formal announcement was made by senior law enforcement officials or spiritual leaders. “The Islamic Republic often tests ideas by putting them up for discussion,” she said.
Iranian state broadcaster al-Alam reported on Sunday that Iranian officials had not confirmed the move, accusing foreign media of misrepresenting the attorney general’s remarks as a “retreat” in the face of the protests.
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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has flatly rejected growing calls to end the headscarf requirement for women, introduced shortly after the 1979 revolution. Defining scenes from the ongoing uprising, women have publicly removed their hijab and burned it.
With or without a vice squad on patrol, Vakil said the mandatory dress code remains in place in Iran and the state “has many other ways of oppressing people” and enforcing its rules. “We don’t yet know if the disbandment means they will no longer be there or if they will move out of law enforcement oversight to a different entity and be given different capacities.”
Initial reactions were mixed, both abroad and among protest movement sympathizers online: some scoffed at the move, others hailed it as an apparent victory.
“They genuinely believe that shutting down the vice squad will make a difference,” said one user wrote on Twitter. “Didn’t you realize that our goal is the whole system?”
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Experts explain what exactly Iran’s moral police are doing and why women on the front lines are risking their lives to fight it. (Video: Julie Yoon/Washington Post)
“If the regime has now reacted in any way to these protests, that could be a positive thing, but we have to see how it actually develops in practice and what the Iranian people think,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CBS News “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Iran’s Guidance Patrol was officially established in the 1990s to track down and punish violators of the strict, if sometimes arbitrarily enforced, religious rules and dress codes of the Islamic Republic’s ruling clergy. Unit power and state enforcement of hijab rules have ebbed and fallen over the years, but this summer ultra-conservative Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi ordered patrols to be stepped up.
In response, women began holding small protests and removing their hijab. Amini’s death in September sparked such outrage in part because women across Iran were fed up with decades of authorities interfering in their lives — and the wider gender segregation and state violence that bolstered the Islamic Republic.
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The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom have imposed sanctions on Iran’s morality police for suppressing protesters. In announcing its sanctions, the US Treasury Department said the morality police were “responsible” for Amini’s death.
Amid widespread campaigns of intimidation and arrests, the Iranian judiciary has begun to prosecute protesters in what rights groups say are show trials without due process. Dozens of demonstrators, some minors, face the death penalty.
Kareem Fahim contributed to this report.