Iran: “Police of morals won’t “disturb” women who don’t wear headscarf in public,” President Pezeskian promised

Today (16.09.2024) which is Mahsa Amini’s second death anniversary, Masud Pezeskian’s president promised he would work so that moral police would not “disturb” them who do not wear the mandatory handkerchief in public. “The police of morals are supposed not to face (women), I will make sure they are not disturbed,” the reformist president of Iran told Tehran, during his first press conference after his election in July. Pezeskian made these statements two years after death, on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish descent, arrested by moral police for disrespecting the strict clothing code imposed on women in Iran. “Even the attorney general had stated that (these police officers) had no right to face women,” the president added. During the campaign, Pezeskian had promised to withdraw moral police from the street, a unit responsible for overseeing how women wear the mandatory handkerchief. Mahsha Amini’s death caused a major questioning movement in Iran, with several hundred dead and thousands of people arrested. Authorities called the protests “disturbing” orchestrated by Western countries. Pezeskian, an Iranian parliament MP at the time, had strongly criticised police for the death of Mahsha Amini in September 2022. Today, the Iranian president also said his government is trying to relax the draconian restrictions imposed on the internet, mainly on social media. During the 2022 protests, Iran blocked Instagram and WhatsApp, the most used applications following the blockade on Youtube, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and Tiktok platforms in recent years.