The United States, Canada, and Australia have imposed sanctions on several Iranian officials for their involvement in quelling protests and detaining individuals following the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman, passed away in 2022 while in the custody of Iran’s morality police for not adhering to the mandatory headscarf rule.
The sanctions target twelve officials accused of various offenses, including the killing and detention of protesters, as well as suppressing protests in both 2019 and 2022, along with arresting journalists. President Masoud Pezeshkian had campaigned on stopping the harassment of women by the morality police. However, incidents of women being mistreated by authorities have still continued since Amini’s tragic death.
In 2023, a teenage girl was injured on Tehran’s Metro for not wearing a headscarf and later succumbed to her injuries in the hospital. Also, reports emerged that police had fired on a woman trying to escape a checkpoint to prevent her car from being seized due to not wearing the hijab.
A U.S. Treasury official, Bradley T. Smith, emphasized that despite peaceful calls for reform from the Iranian people, the country’s leaders persist in using violent tactics. The sanctions aim to expose and hold accountable those responsible for carrying out the Iranian regime’s repressive actions.
Though the sanctions limit access to U.S. assets and bank accounts for the targeted individuals and entities, their practical impact may be limited as many of them do not have interactions with the U.S. In a separate development, a United Nations investigation found Iran accountable for the violence resulting in Amini’s death and highlighted the disproportionate and unnecessary use of force by Iranian security forces during the subsequent protests.
Notably, there is an increasing trend in Iranian cities where more women are choosing to appear in public without the mandatory headscarf.