Iranian authorities said they were reviewing a decades-old law requiring women to cover their heads as the country struggles to quell more than two months of dress-code-related protests.
“Both Parliament and the judiciary are working [on the issue]’ whether the law needs to be changed, Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said on Saturday.
Quoted by an Iranian news agency, he did not say what could be changed about the law by the two bodies, both of which are largely in the hands of conservatives.
The review team met with Parliament’s culture commission on Wednesday “and will see the results in a week or two,” the attorney general said.
President Ebrahim Raisi said Saturday that Iran’s republican and Islamic foundations are enshrined in the constitution.
“But there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible,” he said in television commentaries.
The protests began on September 16 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian man of Kurdish origin who was arrested by vice squads for allegedly violating Sharia-based law.
In the weeks that followed, demonstrators burned their hats and shouted anti-government slogans. After Amini’s death, more and more women don’t wear headscarves, especially in fashionable north Tehran.
The hijab headscarf became mandatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.
It remains a highly sensitive issue in a country where conservatives insist it should be mandatory, while reformists want it to be left to individual choice.
In July this year, Raisi, an ultra-conservative, called for the mobilization of “all state institutions to enforce the headscarf law.”
In September, Iran’s main reformist party called for the mandatory hijab law to be repealed.
The Union of Islamic Iran People Party, founded by relatives of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, on Saturday demanded that the authorities “prepare the legal elements that will pave the way for the lifting of the mandatory hijab law”.
The opposition group also called on the Islamic Republic to “officially announce the end of vice squad activities” and “allow peaceful demonstrations,” it said in a statement.
Iran accuses its sworn enemy, the United States and its allies, including Britain, Israel and Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fomenting what the government calls “riots.”
The Oslo-based non-governmental organization Iran Human Rights said on Tuesday at least 448 people had been “killed by security forces in the ongoing nationwide protests”.
UN chief justice Volker Turk said last week that 14,000 people, including children, had been arrested in the crackdown on protests.
The arrest campaign has caught athletes, celebrities and journalists.
According to the reformist newspaper Shargh, the latest arrested included film star Mitra Hajjar, who was arrested at her home on Saturday.