PARIS: Iranian activists and Western nations have dismissed a claim that the protest-hit regime is disbanding its notorious morality police, insisting there was no change to women’s rights.
There were also calls on social media for a three-day strike in Iran, culminating Wednesday on the annual Student Day, nearly three months into a nationwide wave of unrest sparked by the death in custody of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini.
Morality police officers had arrested Amini, 22, in Tehran for allegedly flouting Iran’s strict dress code demanding women wear modest clothing and the hijab headscarf.
“Nothing we have seen suggests Iran’s leadership is improving its treatment of women and girls or ceasing the violence it inflicts on peaceful protesters,” the US State Department said.
Germany’s Foreign Ministry said Iranian protesters “want to live freely and in self-determination,” and disbanding the morality police, “if it is implemented, won’t change that.”
Amini’s death on Sept. 16 triggered women-led protests that have spiraled into the biggest challenge to the regime since the 1979 revolution.
Hundreds of Iranians, including some members of the security forces, have been killed.
In a surprise move over the weekend, Iran’s Prosecutor General Mohammed Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying that the morality police units — known formally as Gasht-e Ershad (“Guidance Patrol”) — had been closed down.
But campaigners were skeptical about his comments, which appeared to be an impromptu response to a question at a conference rather than a clearly signposted announcement by the Interior Ministry.
“Unless they remove all legal restrictions on women’s dress and the laws controlling citizens’ private lives, this is just a PR move,” said Roya Boroumand, co-founder of the US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center rights group.
Abolishing the force, activists argued, would mark no change to Iran’s headscarf policy — a key ideological pillar for its clerical leadership — but rather a switch in tactics on enforcing it. And scrapping the units would be “probably too little too late” for the protesters who now demand outright regime change, Boroumand said.
“Nothing prevents other law enforcement” bodies from policing “the discriminatory laws,” she noted.
The morality police have been a familiar sight since 2006 when they were introduced during the presidency of the ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But the rules, including the headscarf, had been strictly enforced well before then by the clerical leadership that had taken the helm after the fall of the shah in 1979.
