Concerns and questions are growing regarding the Iranian student, arrested after undressing in public on Saturday in front of Azad University in Tehran. Activists are concerned about his likely transfer to a psychiatric hospital. As the video of the young woman in her underwear went viral, the student was quickly established as a symbol of the fight for women's rights in Iran.
According to the activist groups that exposed the affair and posted the video, she stripped naked in protest after being harassed by university officers. They felt that she did not respect the strict mandatory Islamic dress code. Another video shows her being violently put into a car by security forces.
“Forcibly transferred to a psychiatric hospital”
In an unusual statement, the Iranian embassy in France assured that “this student suffered from certain family problems and a fragile psychological condition”. She states that “signs of abnormal behavior had already been observed by those around her”. But according to the media IranWire, based abroad, this French language student had never shown such signs of trouble.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (based in New York), the young woman was “forcibly transferred to a psychiatric hospital […] Iranian authorities systematically use involuntary psychiatric hospitalization as a means of suppressing dissent and undermining the credibility of opponents.”
“A proven method of repression”
The organization cites several cases, including those of several actresses deemed “mentally ill” by a Tehran court in 2023 after defying Islamic laws on compulsory veiling. Or that of the Kurdish rapper Saman Yasin, arrested during the demonstrations of the “Femme Vie Liberté” movement and forcibly hospitalized.
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“Making opponents sick is a proven method of repression,” declared Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003. She equates this strategy to “torture.” “The student who protested transformed her body into a symbol of dissidence,” responded another Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner (2023), Narges Mohammadi. “I appeal for his release and an end to the harassment of women,” she added.
The “Femme Vie Liberté” movement violently repressed
Islamic law in Iran imposes a very strict dress code on women, who are required to wear headscarves and loose clothing that conceals their shapes.
Iranian women are at the origin of an unprecedented revolt movement after the death of the young Kurd Mahsa Amini in September 2022, arrested for not having respected the dress code. It was massively repressed by the authorities, with at least 551 dead and thousands of people injured and arrested, according to NGOs.
