Iranian government disbands ‘moral patrol’ amid protests

Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, speaking on December 3 at an explanatory meeting on jihad, said that one of the units of the so-called morality police had been liquidated in the country, ISNA reports. This decision was announced against the backdrop of ongoing protests in the country since mid-September 2022, in which, according to official figures announced on December 3, at least 200 people were killed.

Protests in Iran began on September 18 after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained in Tehran by a “mentor patrol” for “wrong wearing the hijab.” The official cause of death was the girl’s heart problems. At the same time, according to eyewitnesses, the girl was beaten by representatives of law and order. Amini’s relatives claim that she had no health problems.

“Ershad’s patrols” (“mentoral patrols” or “moral patrols” translated from Farsi. – “Vedomosti”) have nothing to do with the judicial system, and they have been liquidated. <...> Of course, the judiciary continues to monitor behavior in society,” Montazeri said. The main task of the “mentor patrols”, which were separated into a separate structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the mid-2000s, was to monitor the decent appearance of women, as well as the clothes and hairstyles of men.

The Iranian Prosecutor General also confirmed that the issue of wearing the hijab in the country is now in the focus of attention of the judicial branch of power and the country’s parliament. But so far, no decisions have been made on the norms that require girls in Iran to cover their heads. Moreover, both ordinary law enforcement agencies and representatives of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have the right to monitor compliance with the wearing of the hijab.

At the same time, according to the Prosecutor General of Iran, a war is being waged against his country using hybrid methods. He noted that if immediately after the victory of the Islamic Revolution, its opponents set out to resolve the Iranian issue by military means, then they focused on the economy, culture and politics, today the confrontation includes cyber warfare. Among the listed constant enemies of Iran are the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Israel, which operate with the financial support of some Arab countries.

In the Iranian space, the news about the abolition of “mentor patrols” attracted much less attention than abroad, says Yulia Rocknifard, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia and a consultant at the PIR Center. In her opinion, this decision cannot be called a fundamental shift. At the same time, the obligatory wearing of the hijab in Iran existed even before the appearance of “mentor patrols” in the country, and then their functions were performed by other law enforcement agencies. Now in the country, these functions remain with the ordinary police, the Basij militia close to the IRGC, and social pressure does not disappear anywhere, says Rocknifard. No reforms have yet been made regarding the wearing of the hijab in Iran, she adds. The country’s authorities have not made an unequivocal decision on what to do with the ongoing protests, but they clearly will not be able to remove dissatisfaction with one such decision, the expert adds. According to her, the current concession can be regarded as “too little and too late.” The expert calls the ongoing protests in the country a significant leap forward compared to the past in terms of the scale and organization of the protesters, who are not afraid to speak out, including against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei personally.

The decision to cancel one of the morality police units may indicate that the Iranian authorities understand the fallacy of their previous course, says Alexei Malashenko, chief researcher at IMEMO RAS. The principle of the decision to cancel the vice patrols lies in the fact that this concession concerns not only politics, but also religion, the expert believes. Now, it is important for observers to understand whether the mentioned decision was a separate episode or whether there is a trend in Iran towards the weakening of the central government, he adds.