The country’s chancellor of justice announced the matter after more than two months of protests. The protests broke out when a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died at the hands of the chastity police.
Katriina Töyrylä,
Petri Burtsoff
12:13•Updated 15:10
Iran has abolished the chastity police, says the Chancellor of Justice Mohammad Jafar Montazeri according to Iranian media.
– The Chastity Police has nothing to do with the judiciary and it has been abolished, Montazeri said, according to the semi-official news agency ISNA.
According to Montazer, however, the Ministry of Justice will continue to monitor compliance with chastity rules in other ways.
He announced the abolition of the chastity police after more than two months of protests. The protests started when a Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini had died at the hands of the chastity police.
The chastity police arrested Amin because, in their opinion, he was not dressed modestly enough.
Amin’s death led to strong demonstrations, where women, among other things, went without headscarves and cut their hair in public.
The fate of the scarf is also being considered
The Chastity Police was founded in 2006 by the old president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the reign. The aim was to promote “the culture of modesty and the use of the hijab headscarf”. The chastity police started patrolling the streets and watching people’s behavior.
Montazeri previously said Iran is reviewing a decades-old law requiring women to cover their heads.
According to the Al-Jazeera news channel (you will switch to another service) so far, however, there are no signs that Iran is abandoning the headscarf ban.
President Ebrahim Raisi said on TV that Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations are enshrined in the constitution, but there are ways to apply the constitution flexibly.
The wearing of the hijab was made compulsory four years after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Dress standards have changed over time. They were especially mitigated by the moderate president who was in power from 2013 to 2021 Hassan Rouani during. Women began to be seen in, among other things, jeans and colorful loose headscarves.
In July, the current elderly president Raisi, on the other hand, called on all state institutions to implement the headscarf law.
Despite this, many women, especially in the cities, stretched the rules and wore tight pants and scarves that covered their hair loosely.
The chastity police have been established to monitor women’s dress and behavior also in Sunni Saudi Arabia, which has bad relations with Shiite Iran. In recent years, however, the importance of the chastity police has decreased there, as the country has tried to shape the image of how it is perceived.
Support for Iranian women has also been shown in Finland. Watch the video of the students’ November demonstration in Espoo:
Source: AFP