Iran’s Unfinished Reckoning

Four years after Jina Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police, the streets may be quieter but the machinery built to silence the people has not disappeared. It has learned to watch from behind cameras and return in the shadow of the gallows. 

As a high school student in 2022, I remember reading the headlines about Amini’s death. Her death ignited protests against Iran’s compulsory hijab laws, but what followed became much larger than a movement over a piece of clothing. The protests grew into a nationwide challenge to the state itself, bringing together demands for freedom, equality and an end to repression. At the time, I found myself wondering whether the government would continue sentencing its own protesters to death once the streets fell silent. Four years later, the answer is no longer in question. It is a pattern.

From Patrols to Surveillance: Vans to Cameras

In late 2022, following the prolonged nationwide protests, Iranian officials announced that they were suspending the morality police. The suspension did not last long. By mid-2023, the patrols were back on foot or in unmarked vans under a new name. Warning women was followed by threats of arrest and “re-education” for those who continued to defy the imposed dress code.

Since then, their methods have shifted again: away from policing individuals and toward policing their entire surroundings. Between June and October 2025 alone, authorities locked the doors of over 50 businesses – including cafes, restaurants, wedding halls and clothing boutiques – all for serving unveiled or improperly veiled women. The heaviest enforcement of these regulations did not fall on the capital, but on smaller cities such as Kashan and Borujerd. In Isfahan, license-plate cameras surveilled the city’s inhabitants, generating automated text messages sent directly to the car owners’ phones accusing drivers and passengers of "improper veiling.” Furthermore, in Qom and Mashhad, state inspectors visited workplaces unannounced to remind female employees of the theocratic government’s rules. 

The Iranian Parliament attempted to formalize a harsher version of the dress code in September 2023, raising penalties for noncompliance. However, the government halted its implementation in December 2024 after a rise in public and international backlash, with officials citing  “ambiguities that needed to be resolved.”

The Dichotomy of the Gallows

The executions of 2022 did not end the street protests; if anything, they added fuel to the fire. Mohammed Mehdi Karami, a young karate champion, and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini were hanged in January 2023 for their participation in the protests during a 40-day commemoration for another protester killed earlier that year. According to human rights monitors, their convictions and sentencing were built on confessions extracted under physical and psychological torture. The executions continued for years afterward: Mojahed Kourkour, the eleventh person executed in connection with the 2022 protests, was hanged in June 2025. This was followed by Mehran Bahramian in September, days before the uprising’s anniversary. Activists within and outside of Iran’s borders have argued that the authorities’ timing was not a mere coincidence and was meant to deter commemoration. 

Then, in December 2025, a second uprising broke out, this time over the Rial’s collapse, inflation and corruption. The government met the protesters with a force that mirrored its response to the Amini protests: heavy machine guns and live ammunition, leaving thousands dead in Tehran and provincial cities over a span of only two days in January 2026.  Eclipsing the Orwellian surveillance state, authorities cut internet access to conceal the extent of the violence and its toll. Between March and August 2026, Human Rights Watch documented at least 59 men executed on vague national security charges tied to waves of unrest. Some of these victims were still teenagers, and all were hanged in public squares. This made it clear that the legal and security apparatus built to suppress the women’s rights movement was not only intact, but was also being used as a tool against the people’s reaction to the economic crisis.

Beyond Headscarves

United Nations investigators have reframed the way the world perceives human rights violations in Iran. What was previously perceived as a series of discrete and unrelated violations has become a coherent system of control. Since 2024, a steep rise in criminal prosecutions of women over mandatory hijab laws under what is called the “Noor plan” has been recorded. That system now has jurisdiction well past the headscarf. In March 2025, women’s rights defenders were arrested across Iran’s Kurdish cities for speaking out against child marriage, violence against women and the execution of women prisoners, prompting one detainee to declare that “the women’s movement has passed the point of no return.” On a broader level, musicians have been scourged and arrested for songs and performances commemorating or applauding the uprising. This exemplifies how cultural and creative expressions are treated as a security threat rather than mere noncompliance. 

The state is no longer only punishing what women wear, but policing solidarity and expression as forms of resistance in their own right. A term like gender apartheid, now formally used by some UN Human Rights bodies, fills the gap that the term “women’s rights violations” leaves. This mirrors the realization that in the case of Iran, discrimination is institutionalized rather than incidental, as mechanisms to uphold it are built into law and state security.

A History, or a Continual Narrative?

At the time, reporting of the Amini protests placed the event at the end of a single escalating legal and political timeline: the hijab was protested against in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, codified in 1983, criminalized in 1990 and resisted again in 2022. Four years on, that timeline needs to be revised and separated into two directions at once. 

The first path is toward repetition. Iran’s modern history runs on cycles of protest, repression and partial governmental retreat. Years of protests followed by government crackdown (1979, 1999, 2009, 2017-2019, 2022) show a familiar pattern of tactical withdrawal under pressure, reversible whenever the pressure eases.

The second revision is toward rupture, pointing in a completely different direction. The aforementioned security apparatus created to crush the women’s rights movement was, in January 2026, turned on protesters whose grievance was the price of bread, not the hijab. Mass surveillance, show trials, public executions and internet shutdowns once again became part of the nation’s day-to-day life. This transferability suggests that 2022 was far more than a chapter in the history of women’s rights in Iran; it was the moment when the government created a general machinery of repression. A generation of young Iranians hаs now lived its entire political adolescence inside that machinery; a girl who was 14 when Amini died is 18 today. 

An Open Question, Still

Marking the fourth anniversary of Amini’s death in September, 10 civil society groups inside Iran – including oil workers, nurses, retirees, women’s rights activists and anti-execution campaigners – issued a joint statement reaffirming the same demands for freedom, equality, economic security and an end to repression. The fact that the demands have not changed in four years, even as the grounds of the protests have magnified from dress code to food prices and shortages, is itself the wider story. The dichotomy between a government that has not been removed and a movement that cannot be silenced shows that the core of the problem first exposed in 2022, or arguably 1979, still has no settled answer. Four years later, Iran’s reckoning remains unfinished.

Photo Source: Tim Dennell, Flickr. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.