Iran official announces abolishment of morality police

Iran's Prosecutor General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri has announced that the morality police operations are over.

Speaking on December 3 at an event aimed at “outlining the hybrid war during recent riots”, which is how Iranian officials describe alleged foreign influence in the unrest, Al Jazeera reported that the prosecutor general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said that the morality police “has no connection with the judiciary and was shut down by the same place that it had been launched from in the past”.

While he did not specify whether the mandatory dress code would be terminated, the prosecutor general did say that Iranian authorities would review a decades-old law that requires women to cover their heads, as the country struggles to quell more than two months of protests linked to the dress code.

“Both parliament and the judiciary are working [on the issue],” of whether the law needs any changes, according to the Guardian.

After the outbreak of protests following the death of a young girl in police custody for the improper wear of her headscarf, demonstrators started burning their head coverings with a growing number of women not wearing headscarves in public, particularly in Tehran’s fashionable north.

The hijab headscarf became obligatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.