The nation’s government-run media started fighting back, stating that the contentious police force is still in place, hours after The New York Times, quoting a senior Iranian official, claimed that Iran’s morality police had been abolished.
The Times on Sunday covered recent remarks made by Iran’s attorney general on the Guidance Patrol, the nation’s harsh morality police that has drawn criticism from around the world in light of recent protests. The weekend quoted Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, Iran’s attorney general, as saying that the morality police “was dissolved by the same authorities who formed it” in a meeting.
A connection was made between the police force’s dissolution and the continuous anti-government demonstrations in The Times’ subsequent claim that the force had been “abolished.” However, state media swiftly refuted that assertion, leaving it unclear as to whether or not Iran aggressively polices women’s clothing.
No official of the Islamic Republic of Iran has stated that the Guidance Patrol has been shut down, according to the state television network Al-Alam, which claimed on Sunday that Montazeri’s remarks had been misconstrued.
According to CNN’s Al-Alam, “some international media have attempted to interpret these statements by the prosecutor-general as the Islamic Republic backing away from the subject of Hijab and modesty.”
Since the middle of September, when a 22-year-old Iranian lady was arrested by the police for allegedly donning a headscarf too loosely, Iran’s morality police squad has generated widespread outrage.
According to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Mahsa Amini passed while in police custody after being detained.
She was detained by the police and arrested for what Thomas-Greenfield described as an “educational and reorientation lesson.” She was taken to the hospital several hours later in a coma and passed away two days later.
Iranian police claimed that Amini had a heart issue, but her family disputes that claim, claiming that she is not heart-related and that injuries found on her body prove she was tortured.
As the world’s attention has turned to the morality police, which the U.S. State Department has described as an organization that enforces “restrictions on freedom of expression,” Iranian women have taken to the streets to protest Amini’s death in the weeks and months since, risking violence and even death as they do so.
Similar law enforcement agencies that enforce “morality” have been observed elsewhere in the world, including in Afghanistan, where the Ministry of Vice and Virtue rose to prominence as a symbol of arbitrary abuses under the previous Taliban regime in the mid-1990s. Thomas-Greenfield made this claim earlier.
According to Thomas-Greenfield, “These [law enforcement organizations that enforce morals]tend to be harsher against women.”
In October, Antony Blinken, secretary of state, declared that sanctions had been placed on Iran’s moral police as well as “high-security officers who have engaged in egregious human rights abuses.”
The Treasury Department claimed at the time that “these officials manage organizations that habitually deploy violence to crush peaceful protestors and members of Iranian civil society, political dissidents, women’s rights activists, and members of the Iranian Baha’i community.”
