According to a fact-finding mission ordered by the UN, Iranian women continue to face systemic discrimination, and Mahsa Amini’s death while in the morality police of Iran was declared illegal and the result of violence.
The murder of Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish descent, in September 2022 while she was being held for allegedly disobeying Iran’s Islamic dress code sparked months of unrest and the worst threat in decades to the religious authorities of the Islamic Republic.
“We found that she was physically abused while in the care of the state authorities, which is why her death was illegal,” Sara Hossain, the chair of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, stated at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The fact-finding team discovered that rape and sexual assault, in addition to extrajudicial murders and arbitrary arrests, were commonplace during the riots that ensued.
“These acts were conducted in the context of a widespread and systematic attack against women and girls, and other persons expressing support for human rights,” Hossain said.
“Some of these serious violations of human rights thus rose to the level of crimes against humanity.”
The secretary general of Iran High Council for Human Rights, Kazem Gharib Abadi, responded by accusing the fact-finding team of a “glaring lack of independence and impartiality”.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the state of human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, made his remarks to the Human Rights Council separately. He stated that human rights advocate Narges Mohammadi, who is now detained, “suffers from severe health issues, including serious heart and lung conditions, placing her health at great risk.”
Regarding Mohammadi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year, Hossain stated, “She was denied medical access because she did not have the mandatory hijab.”
According to Hossain, discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been “affecting virtually all aspects of their private and public lives” since the demonstrations started in 2022.
She said that it was “hard to fathom” that women’s economic possibilities, access to hospitals, colleges, schools, and courts “should be subjected to a wholly arbitrary requirement of wearing the mandatory hijab”.
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