On September 16, 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in Tehran, Iran in the custody of the country’s so-called morality police. In the six months since her death, Amini has inspired a mass wave of protests across Iran. Azadeh* is a young female lawyer in Iran. She began her legal studies in 2013, and has since studied law, human rights, and mediation. Throughout the uprising, Azadeh has filed dispatches with JURIST, empowering our mission to engage law students around the world and uphold the rule of law.
Azadeh explains that the location where Amini was arrested is a common outpost for the morality police. She has often seen them and describes the humiliation of their presence. “When you are passing by them in front of them you can feel how much fear every single girl who has gone the same path has experienced,” she says.
“The fear is actually unbearable because you don’t know what is going to happen next. Mostly, people are arrested, and there is just some formality, and they ask you to call your family members like you’re not able to decide yourself. You have to call your parents or a male member of your family to bring you proper clothes and change there. As far as I have heard from my friends, it can lead to something much more severe like what happened to Mahsa.”
Azadeh was born in a religious Muslim family. She is no longer a practicing Muslim, but she “does not dare to say it out loud.” However, she explains that even the most devout Muslims she knows do not want to be represented by “barbaric actors who force their ideas onto people.”
I wonder if, given Iran’s recent history of protests, this wave feels inevitable. Azadeh agrees and explains that Amini’s death was “probably that last drop of water that filled the glass.” Now, “more and more people are getting to this conclusion that this government cannot stay because it is just getting worse and worse. The way they actually treat people in the protest is getting more extreme every time.”
Though protestors may have different opinions and faiths, Azadeh believes they share the common goal of “actually changing the government.” Overall, “we are actually hoping to lose less people – less lives – and I guess definitely every person in this revolution knows what they want – they want this regime to be done. But afterwards the shape of the government would definitely be chosen by referendum by the people.”
I ask if that future feels within reach. “Every dictator has to go sooner or later, and that’s what history tells us, and that’s what logic tells us,” she says resolutely, “It’s going to happen in the near future — I hope we are still alive to see that.”
Azadeh has serious doubts about claims by Iranian officials of mass pardons. She explains that “most of the people who are free now are waiting for the legal process to end, so afterwards they might be sentenced to prison – imprisonment – or other source of punishment.”
The seemingly endless cycle of mass arrests and pardons are “not actually logical,” she says. “They just randomly arrest people in some cities — small cities — in Iran, and I don’t know, it’s just some way of playing some mental game.”
I note that the mental abuse of the regime seems just as bad as the physical threats. She says, “but much worse because it can lead to anything and there are a lot of — we actually hear about imprisoned people who have drugs in order to commit suicide, and they are in prison, and they cannot stand the idea of getting executed and prefer to kill themselves. That’s actually much more hurtful.”
I ask her how she thinks the international community should deal with such a deceitful regime.
She hopes that international media does not simply represent “regime propaganda.”
“People were getting killed here, and they were saying people were against sanctions of the US,” she says, “no — we are against this regime.” She believes severe international action against the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corp is “definitely needed for these protests to become more like a revolution in the near future.”
JURIST publishes accounts from women around the world living through turmoil. I ask if Azadeh feels a sense of camaraderie with JURIST’s correspondents from places like Myanmar and Afghanistan.
She answers, “Yes actually I believe that the same pains make people closer to each other more than anything in this world. At different levels, we experience the same thing.” In those nations — and especially in Iran — Azadeh feels educated women like her play a special role. She believes that “what we can experience after this regime [can] be much brighter than any other country in the Middle East because people — and exactly women — know what they want in the future, and they are willing to participate in working and being in society side by side with men.”
I ask Azadeh how she feels day-to-day. Is she exhausted? Excited?
“At the beginning, we were just trying to stop our routine life and dedicate our lives to revolution. Little by little, people like me realized that this is going to take longer, and this revolution should be a part of your routine life. Your routine life cannot be stopped.” Azadeh hoped to study abroad and continue her education. She still plans to apply, but she swears, “as long long as I’m here I will definitely do anything I can for this revolution no matter what.”
*Pseudonym used to protect the safety of the interviewee.
