Dubai: Women in Iran who do not wear headscarves in public are being targeted in growing numbers under draconian laws with penalties that include making them wash corpses in morgues and undergo psychological counselling for “anti-social behaviour,” human rights groups say.
The punishments highlight a widening crackdown on women and girls, as Iranian MPs vote to review, behind closed doors, new laws that would enshrine penalties on women who defy veil laws.
Iran has seen a fierce uprising of women discarding their veils since Kurdish Mahsa Amini died while in custody of the morality police last September. The 22-year-old had been detained for allegedly violating the compulsory veil law.
Masses of women, including prominent Iranian actresses have since been handed prison sentences for breaching the laws or in some cases forced to attend psychological counselling to obtain “certificates of healthiness”.
Australian-British academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was held in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons on trumped-up espionage charges for 804 days, said the harsh punishments being meted out showed little has changed in the regime’s approach to women’s rights.
“Iran remains a country of gender apartheid, wherein women are treated as second-class citizens under the law. The mandatory hijab is the most obvious expression of this, but it is not the most sinister,” she said.
Read the article by Lucy Cormack in The Sydney Morning Herald.