The video of the young woman in her underwear, first sitting then walking slowly in front of the prestigious university went viral over the weekend, and the student was quickly established as a new symbolic figure in the fight for rights women in Iran.
“I salute the courage of this young woman who is showing resistance and has risen to the rank of icon for the fight of women in Iran, for the fight of women wherever their rights are threatened,” declared the leader of French diplomacy Jean-Noël Barrot on the France 2 channel, ensuring that the French embassy in Iran was monitoring his situation “very carefully”.
According to activist groups who revealed the case on Saturday and posted the video, the young woman stripped naked in protest after being harassed by university officers who believed she was not respecting the strict Islamic dress code. OBLIGATORY. Another video shows her being violently put into a car by security forces.
The Iranian Fars agency confirmed the incident on Saturday, assuring that the student wore “inappropriate” clothes in class and had “undressed” after being “calmly” warned by security agents.
In an unusual statement, the Iranian embassy in France assured that “this student suffered from certain family problems and a fragile psychological condition” and affirmed that “signs of abnormal behavior had already been observed by those around her”.
Psychiatric hospital
Uncertainty reigns over the fate of the young woman.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI, based in New York), the young woman was “forcibly transferred to a psychiatric hospital”, without further information.
According to Azad University spokesperson cited by conservative media, the student was handed over to the police by security officers due to “immoral” conduct.
“She was under strong psychological pressure and suffered from mental disorders,” according to this source, indicating that the young woman was separated from her husband and mother of two children.
The media IranWirebased abroad, indicated for her part that she was a French language student at university and had never shown signs of psychological disorders.
“Iranian authorities systematically use involuntary psychiatric hospitalization as a means to suppress dissent and undermine the credibility of opponents,” CHRI executive director Hadi Ghaemi said in a statement.
The organization cites several cases, such as that of actress Afsaneh Bayegan and two other actresses who were deemed “mentally ill” by a Tehran court in July 2023 after defying Islamic laws on compulsory veiling. .
Or that of Kurdish rapper Saman Yasin, arrested during the “Femme Vie Liberté” movement demonstrations and forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric establishment in July 2023.
The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, also claimed that the young student had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital. “Making opponents sick is a proven method of repression,” she said, likening this strategy to “torture.”
“The student who protested transformed her body into a symbol of dissidence,” reacted in a message on the networks another Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner (2023), the imprisoned opponent Narges Mohammadi. “I appeal for his release and an end to the harassment of women,” she added.
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 in the country after the death of the young Kurd Mahsa Amini in September 2022, arrested for not having respected the dress code.
The Femme Vie Liberté movement has been massively repressed by the Iranian authorities, with at least 551 deaths and thousands of people arrested, according to NGOs.
