After two and a half months of massive protests that sparked international outrage and shook the regime in Iranthe attorney general announced the abandonment of the “morality police”.
In a statement on Sunday, he added that the Guidance Patrol, i.e. the moral police, had been abolished, stressing that it had been untied from the judiciary.
He also went on to say that it was overruled by the same party that set it up in the past, according to the labor news agency, ‘ILNA’.
What is the “moral police”?
Although patrols similar to the Tawjih Patrols have operated in various forms since the 1980s in Iran, the activity of these patrols under this name started in 2005.
After the “1979 revolution”, various patrols were formed to address social issues considered a red line for the government, such as women’s dress or the ratio of boys to girls, including patrols from the Islamic Revolution Committees and the “Soldiers of God” patrols of the gendarmerie, in the sixties, before the merger of the two forces. In the police force, and the “Thar Allah” patrols of the Revolutionary Guards in cooperation with the Basij forces.
During the presidency of the late politician Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 1996, and with the merger of the Revolutionary Committees with the police and gendarmerie, these patrols continued in the form of a police force, and in June of the same year the Ministry of the Interior implemented a plan to “combat non-veiling” in Tehran.
In 1996 the Iranian Interior Ministry implemented a project to “fight the bad veil” in the capital, Tehran, at the beginning, and these patrols continued in the following years with changes in form and name, except in the last days of reformist President Muhammad Khatami, moral police forces have been approved.
Until the Supreme Council for the Cultural Revolution, which follows Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, approved “Strategies for Developing a Culture of Chastity and Hijab” at its 566th session on August 4, 2004.
The Ethics Journal in its current form was formed at the end of reformist former President Mohammad Khatami’s government in 2005.
When was it most active?
According to Ismail Ahmadi Moqaddam, former commander of the police force, the formation of the Orientation Patrol took place on the basis of a decision approved by the Supreme Revolutionary Council during the last days of the government of Muhammad Khatami, and was implemented early in the administration by former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It is interesting to note that the reformists, when they assumed the presidency of the Republic in Iran, worked to limit the phenomenon of the diffusion of the morality of the police force, but in the era of the extremist current they have strongly activated, since women prosecute and they arrest girls who do not adhere to the hijab, while the police force chase young people who wear clothes that the authorities consider “inappropriate and part of the Western cultural invasion of Iranian society”.
Since Amini was killed on September 16, 2022, three days after being arrested by the morality police, the demonstrations in the country have not subsided.
Her death has since ignited anger on several issues, including the restrictions placed on personal freedoms and strict rules on women’s clothing, as well as the economic and housing crisis Iranians suffer from, not to mention the strict laws imposed by the regime and its political and religious composition in general.
Meanwhile, the security forces resorted to violence and repression, resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests, and scores of people were sentenced to severe penalties, including executions.
