Representational image. News18
New Delhi: Amid conflicting news of Iran having disbanded the morality patrol and continuing protests against the Islamic regime, Iranian officials have now suggested using facial recognition to enforce mandatory hijab law.
Ali Khan Mohammadi, spokesperson for the Enjoining Good and Forbidding Wrong Headquarters – responsible for determining and enforcing certain religious and social standards in Iran, during an interview with the website Entekhab on 5 December said that advanced technologies, a reference to surveillance cameras, needed to be used to enforce the mandatory hijab law.
Mohammadi, during the interview, also said, “the mission of morality patrol has ended”, hinting at the regime looking for other ways to enforce the mandatory hijab.
The secretary of the Enjoining Good and Forbidding Wrong Headquarters, Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, also suggested using facial recognition software to enforce the mandatory hijab law in August 2022.
Iran has seen mass protests since the death of 23-year-old Mahsa Amini on 16 September, after she had a heart attack following her arrest by the morality police. The protests, which have seen the death of over 200 people – including over 50 children – have been aimed at the morality policy and Iran’s mandatory Hijab law.
Status of morality police not clear
Meanwhile, the confusion around the morality patrol continues to loom with the contradiction between the messages being put out by the officials and the local media reports.
On Saturday evening the Iranian state-run news agency ISNA reported that Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri told a conference that “morality police” have “nothing to do with the justice department” and have been “shut down by those who created it.”
The development was soon translated as the abolition of the morality police in western media and projected as a success of the protests.
On Monday, however, state-run broadcaster Al-Alam reported that Montazeri’s statements had been taken out of context and that Iran’s justice department would “continue to monitor public behaviour.”
These contradicting statements with the reports of continuing protests and morality police working as usual have led to confusion. Iranian anti-establishment activists have accused the regime of deliberately resorting to obfuscation to break the momentum of the protests.
Prosecutor General Mohammad Javad Montazeri, had on 1 December said that the parliament and the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council are considering the question of mandatory hijab and a decision on that would be announced only on 16 December.
Critics of the regime allege that the obfuscation was part of the regime’s information tactic to weaken protests and bring Hijab back into the discourse.
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