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Iran's Judiciary Chief Threatens to Prosecute 'Without Mercy' Unveiled Women


FILE-Veiled Iranian women attend a conservatives campaign gathering in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 24, 2016.
FILE-Veiled Iranian women attend a conservatives campaign gathering in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 24, 2016.

Faced with an increasing number of women defying the compulsory dress code, Iran’s judiciary chief has threatened to prosecute "without mercy" women who appear in public unveiled, Iranian media reported Saturday.

Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei’s warning comes on the heels of an Interior Ministry statement Thursday that reinforced the government’s mandatory hijab law.

“Unveiling is tantamount to enmity with (our) values,” Ejei was quoted as saying by several news sites. Those “who commit such anomalous acts will be punished” and will be “prosecuted without mercy,” he said, without saying what the punishment entails.

Ejei, Iran's chief justice, said law enforcement officers were “obliged to refer obvious crimes and any kind of abnormality that is against the religious law and occurs in public to judicial authorities.”

FILE - Women attend a protest against the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died while in police custody in Iran, during a rally in Tel Aviv, Oct. 29, 2022.
FILE - Women attend a protest against the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died while in police custody in Iran, during a rally in Tel Aviv, Oct. 29, 2022.

A growing number of Iranian women have been ditching their veils since the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in the custody of the morality police last September. Mahsa Amini had been detained for allegedly violating the hijab rule.

Government forces violently put down months of nationwide revolt unleashed by her death.

Still, risking arrest for defying the obligatory dress code, women are widely seen unveiled in malls, restaurants, shops and streets around the country. Videos of unveiled women resisting the morality police have flooded social media.

Under Iran's Islamic Sharia law, imposed after the 1979 revolution, women are obliged to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes to disguise their figures. Violators have faced public rebuke, fines or arrest.

Head-to-toe veiled Iranian women walk at the shrine of Saint Saleh in northern Tehran, April 6, 2021.
Head-to-toe veiled Iranian women walk at the shrine of Saint Saleh in northern Tehran, April 6, 2021.

Describing the veil as “one of the civilizational foundations of the Iranian nation” and “one of the practical principles of the Islamic Republic,” the Interior Ministry statement Thursday said there would be no “retreat or tolerance” on the issue.

It urged ordinary citizens to confront unveiled women. Such directives have in past decades emboldened hardliners to attack women without impunity.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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