Image of a young woman protesting on steps of the Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Originally published in The Guardian:

In New Hijab Crackdown, Iran Police Drag Women From Streets

UPDATE, NOV 14:

Iran’s authorities are planning to open a “hijab removal treatment clinic” for women do not cover their heads in public.

Mehri Talebi Darestani, head of the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said the clinic will offer “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal”.

Sima Sabet, a UK-based Iranian journalist who was targeted in an assassination attempt last year, said the move is “shameful”: “The idea of establishing clinics to ‘cure’ unveiled women is chilling, where people are separated from society simply for not conforming to the ruling ideology.”

Iranian human rights lawyer Hossein Raisi said the clinic is “neither Islamic and nor is it aligned with Iranian law”. He noted that the statement comes from a department which is under the direct authority of the Supreme Leader.

One young woman in Iran explained:

It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison. We are struggling to make ends meet and have power outages, but a piece of cloth is what this state is worried about. If there was a time for all of us to come back to the streets, it’s now or they’ll lock us all up.

ORIGINAL ENTRY, NOV 12: Human rights organizations say they are gravely concerned that a young Iranian woman arrested for stripping down to her underwear could be subjected to torture after she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital by the authorities.

Amnesty International said it had found evidence that the Iranian regime used electric shocks, torture, beatings and chemical substances on protesters and political prisoners taken to state-run psychiatric institutions after being called mentally unstable. It said the situation facing the young woman was “alarming”.

Video of the young woman, who has not been formally identified, walking around a university campus in Tehran in her underwear was widely circulated on social media last week before she was seen being arrested by police officers. She is believed to have been protesting at being physically assaulted by campus security guards at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran for failing to comply with the strict dress code imposed on all Iranian women.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran called the student’s transfer to an undisclosed psychiatric facility a “kidnapping”, saying the use of forced transfer of anti-regime protesters to mental health facilities was being increasingly used to silence dissent.

Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of CHRI, said:

Iranian authorities systematically use involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation as a tool to suppress dissent, branding protesters as mentally unstable to undermine their credibility.

Transferring individuals who participate in peaceful protests to psychiatric hospitals represents not only an act of arbitrary detention but also constitutes a form of kidnapping. This practice is a blatantly unlawful move to discredit activists by labelling them mentally unstable.

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