Iran’s morality police will resume patrols to ensure that women adhere to stringent Islamic dress codes, ten months after a young woman’s death while in their custody sparked widespread protests, according to state media on Sunday.
According to Saeid Montazeralmahdi, a spokesman for Iran’s law enforcement agency Faraja, police will resume vehicle and foot patrols across the nation as of Sunday.
Officers will first issue warnings to women who are disobeying before taking legal action against those who “insist on breaking the norms,” the officer said.
Mahsa Amini, 22, who was detained by the morality police for wearing her hijab (or headscarf) incorrectly and taken to a “re-education” facility, died three days later, bringing the morality police into the public eye.
Her death sparked nationwide protests that rocked the country, posing one of the biggest domestic threats to Iran’s ruling clerical regime in more than a decade.
Witnesses claimed that the morality police had nearly disappeared from Tehran’s streets during the months-long movement, which was violently put down by the authorities.
Human rights organizations claim Iran executed at least 582 people last year, a 75 percent increase from 2021. They claim Tehran tried to intimidate anti-regime protesters by increasing the number of executions.
Human Rights Watch told the media last year that the morality police have access to authority, weapons, detention facilities, and control over “re-education centers”. The United States and the European Union both have sanctions against the group.
The centers function as detention facilities where women—and occasionally men—are arrested for disobeying the modesty laws of the state.
Detainees are forced to sign a pledge to uphold the state’s dress codes before they are allowed to leave the facilities, where they are subjected to lectures about Islam and the significance of the hijab.
Source-CNN
