Women’s Day: UN panel castigates Iran govt for Mahsa Amini’s death

Virendra Pandit

New Delhi: A United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report has found Iran responsible for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 which sparked nationwide protests against the conservative Islamic country’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab, laws and its ruling theocracy.

The UN panel’s stark pronouncement came on International Women’s Day on Friday in a wide-ranging initial report submitted to the UNHRC by the Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, the media reported.

The Islamic Republic employed unnecessary and disproportionate use of lethal force to put down the demonstrations that erupted following Amini’s death. The Iranian security forces also sexually assaulted detainees, it said.

The long-drawn security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained amid widespread protests in which several women publicly cut down their hair or even tonsured heads to register their anger against the Shia regime.

The report is unlikely to change Iran’s conservative government, now more firmly in the hands of hardliners after a low-turnout vote last week put them back in charge of the country’s handpicked parliament.

However, it puts further international pressure on Tehran amid wider Western concerns about its advancing nuclear program, Iran’s arming of Russia in Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and the relentless harassment and imprisonment of activists, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi.

The women’s nationwide protests, also supported by many men, were unprecedented because of the leadership of women and youth, in their reach and longevity and, ultimately, the state’s violent response.

Amini, 22, died on September 16, 2022, in a Tehran hospital after her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab ‘properly.’ She was brought to Iran’s Vozara detention facility to undergo a “re-education class,” but collapsed after 26 minutes and was taken to a hospital 30 minutes later, where she died.

Iran denied being responsible for her death or that she had been beaten. Islamist officials even claimed a medical condition Amini had from childhood after surgery could have caused her death. The UN report, however, dismissed this claim.

The panel “established the existence of evidence of trauma to Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police.”

Based on the evidence and patterns of violence by the morality police in the enforcement of the mandatory hijab on women, the UN report found that Amini was subjected to physical violence that led to her death, but it stopped
short of blaming anyone specifically for harming Amini.

The protests that followed Amini’s death started first with the chant Women, Life, Freedom. However, the protesters’ chanting and cries soon grew into open calls of revolt against Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The UN report found that Iranian security forces used shotguns, assault rifles, and submachine guns against demonstrators in situations where there was no imminent threat of death or serious injury to them, thereby committing unlawful and extrajudicial killings.

It also found a pattern of protesters being shot intentionally in the eye.

The mission noted the deterrent and chilling effect of such injuries, as they permanently marked the victims, essentially branding them as protesters.

Some of those detained faced sexual violence, including rape, the threat of rape, forced nudity, groping, and electrocution of their genitals.

The security forces played on social and cultural stigma connected to sexual and gender-based violence to spread fear and humiliate and punish women, men, and children.

The panel also cited its probe into the 2023 death of a teenager, Armita Garavand, who died after falling on the Tehran Metro in what activists alleged was an attack on her for not wearing a hijab. Her parents were, however, quoted as saying that a blood pressure issue, a fall, or perhaps both contributed to their daughter’s death.

In actions reminiscent of Amini’s case, the state officials took measures to obfuscate the circumstances leading to Garavand’s death, the report said, noting a suspected spate of poisonings targeting Iranian schoolgirls, without concluding what transpired in the incidents.