Iran’s protest wave is no longer defined only by street clashes. It has entered a phase in which the state governs visibility itself. Days of near-total internet shutdown have reduced national connectivity to a sliver of ordinary levels. This is not a technical failure. It is a governing tactic that makes violence harder to document, verify, and pursue through law.
A video verified and geolocated by AFP shows dozens of bodies outside the Kahrizak forensic center south of Tehran, black bags on the ground as relatives search among them. Rights organizations cited in the same reporting describe the images as evidence of a deadly crackdown. Other monitors report live ammunition, mass arrests, and a rising death toll during roughly two weeks of unrest, while the blackout restricts information and frustrates independent verification.
To describe this only as authoritarian repression misses what matters for constitutional lawyers. The violence is not merely happening alongside Iran’s constitutional order. It is occurring through an order built to treat regime preservation as a superior good, and dissent as a threat to the sacred identity of the state.
Rights that are structurally conditional
Article 4 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran sets the hierarchy. It requires all laws and regulations to conform to Islamic criteria and extends that requirement across the constitution itself, with the Guardian Council positioned as the judge of compliance. Rights exist, but they do not function as supreme constraints. They are conditional and administered through institutions aligned with the regime’s ideological mission.
That conditionality becomes decisive in mass protest. Even the constitutional clause on assemblies is limited by reference to Islam’s “fundamental principles.” If the state controls what counts as an attack on those principles, it also controls the line between a rights-bearing citizen and a punishable enemy. Repression can be framed as constitutional fidelity.
Hefz-e nezam: preservation as overriding necessity
The doctrine of hefz-e nezam, preservation of the system, links theology to coercion. In Khomeinist political-legal thought, preservation is treated as a highest obligation, capable of overriding other duties when the system is perceived to be threatened. It operates as a constitutional meta-justification: restraint becomes negligence because it risks the collapse of a divinely grounded order.
Iran’s constitutional architecture also normalizes governance through expediency. Article 112 establishes the Expediency Council to resolve institutional conflicts and address matters of state expediency. The effect is not merely procedural. It enables the system to translate necessity into legality, claiming a higher legal logic grounded in survival.
In this frame, state violence becomes legible as duty. When security forces fire into crowds, the regime can present the act not as suppressing citizens, but as defending the state’s sacred constitutional identity.
From protest to sacrilege: penal classification as constitutional technique
The state’s language becomes legally consequential when criminal categories recode dissent into existential deviance. Protesters are routed into offences associated with religious meaning and extreme punishment, including charges linked to “corruption on earth.” These are not only rhetorical slurs. They classify political dissent as theological offense and channel it into security and judicial machinery with a logic of elimination.
External observers sometimes treat these labels as propaganda adjacent to law. In theocratic constitutionalism, they are one way law operates: politics becomes sacrilege, and sacrilege becomes an existential threat.
The blackout as a constitutional technology of massacre
The internet shutdown belongs in the same constitutional analysis. A right is protected only when it can be asserted, documented, litigated, and publicly verified. A prolonged blackout destroys those conditions. It shrinks the evidentiary record, disrupts emergency communication, obstructs medical coordination, and weakens the capacity to identify casualties and perpetrators.
This is how “preserving the system” becomes operational: escalate force, suppress documentation, deny real-time visibility. The morgue footage matters because it punctures that strategy and reveals what the blackout is meant to keep uncounted.
Why domestic law offers no protective space
A constitutional order that subordinates rights to theological criteria, elevates preservation to overriding necessity, and reclassifies protest as sacrilege does not reliably generate protection in the moment of crisis. Even where particular acts violate statutory limits, the hierarchy and institutional design make restraint unlikely and accountability fragile. Under these conditions, the blackout is not simply censorship. It removes the infrastructure that makes rights enforceable.
What “intervention” can lawfully mean
If the domestic order is structurally oriented toward preservation rather than protection, the protective horizon shifts outward. The most defensible framework is Responsibility to Protect (R2P): where a state manifestly fails to protect its population from atrocity crimes, the international community should escalate collective measures, starting with peaceful means and, only if those prove inadequate, moving toward action through the Security Council. This is not a licence for war. It is a discipline of legality and sequence.
Talk of “intervention,” including by Donald Trump, matters mainly as a test of legal limits. The reality of suffering does not, by itself, legalise unilateral force. Outside Security Council authorisation, and absent a self-defence basis, invoking humanitarian motives remains legally contested and, under the prevailing Charter framework, difficult to defend.
The sharper conclusion is narrower and more serious. If live fire, mass arrests, and blackout conditions persist, the international community’s responsibility is collective protection that is lawful, coordinated, and directed at preventing further mass violence and impunity. If those measures fail while mass atrocities continue, the final question becomes unavoidable: what remains, in practice, to protect people when the domestic constitutional order has been designed to disable protection and conceal proof?
Iran’s crisis is not only violence in the streets. It is a constitutional structure that can sanctify that violence, and an informational shutdown that makes sanctification harder to challenge. The morgue footage forces the question the blackout was meant to prevent: how many bodies must “preserving the system” require before the international community accepts that protection cannot be left to the system itself?
Faraz Firouzi Mandomi is a Ph.D. candidate in law at the University of Hamburg. He holds an LL.M. in European Union Law from the University of Hamburg and an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran. His academic interests include constitutional law, human rights, and public international law. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he practiced law in Iran with a focus on public law and rights-based litigation.
