It’s been two years since the world heard the news about a young woman in Iran who was allegedly killed by Iranian police for breaking the country’s hijab laws. The death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini ignited anti-government protests in Iran on a scale that hadn’t been seen in the country since November 2019, when state repression killed hundreds of people and injured thousands of others.

In September 2022, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman was visiting the Iranian capital, Tehran, with her family when she was arrested by officers for breaking the compulsory hijab laws. Amini was taken to a ‘re-education centre’ by officers, where she was allegedly severely beaten, causing her to fall into a coma. She died a few days later in hospital on 16 September 2022. The Iranian government has denied that it caused the death of Amini, claiming that she suffered a heart attack while detained, but her family refuted this claim and shared at the time that Amini was in good health and had no underlying heart conditions.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has observed strict mandatory dress codes, especially for women, that come with punitive punishments, including prison and flogging.

Iran’s repressive government didn’t stop people from taking to the streets to protest the compulsory hijab laws and the brutality of the Iranian regime in what’s been dubbed the ‘Woman Life Freedom’ movement. In the weeks following Amini’s death, protests erupted in over 40 cities, including Tehran. During these protests, women publicly removed their hijabs and even cut their hair as a mark of solidarity – a form of protest that spread across the world, with others also taking to social media to share videos of themselves cutting their hair, including the former Iran detainee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Even though the hijab laws only became a collective issue for Iran’s women’s movement in recent years, there have been plenty of individual acts across the country, such as Sepideh Rashno, who was filmed resisting harassment and vigilante enforcement of the hijab on a bus in July 2022. Or Vida Movahed, who was pictured in December 2017 standing on top of a sidewalk utility box on Revolution Street, a crowded thoroughfare in Tehran, waving her white hijab on a stick in front of her.

A recent Amnesty International report stated: “No effective, impartial and independent criminal investigations have taken place into the serious human rights violations and crimes under international law by Iranian authorities during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests of September to December 2022, including security forces’ extensive and unlawful use of force and firearms.” If anything, the Iranian authorities have sought to silence relatives looking for justice for the unlawful killings of their loved ones through violence, harassment and detention.

Two years on, the Iranian government has escalated its assault on human rights – particularly women’s rights – waging a “war on women and girls” through its Noor plan (implemented in April 2024 onwards), an increasingly violent crackdown on the compulsory veiling laws. With the two-year anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death, there are more protests planned in Iran to honour her and, once again, stand against the violence inflicted upon the Iranian people by their government.

2 years on from the death of Mahsa Amini, Iranian women are still fighting for their rights