State-legislated Discrimination

Taken together, these bills represent a concerted state-sanctioned assault on women’s basic rights and freedoms. More troubling, the specific call for citizen enforcement in the Plan to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice is effectively a state-sanctioned invitation to vigilante justice. Indeed, we have already seen this outcome with the acid attacks on women in Iran, by unknown assailants who have proclaimed their duty to “protect virtue.” None of these bills have yet become law. Yet they are making their way through the legislative process with the full backing of hardliners in the Parliament and in the clerical establishment. The Rouhani administration has publicly—even if tepidly—raised objections to many of these bills, and still has time to try to exert all possible pressure to influence the debate and prevent approval of the proposed bills. Yet hardliners dominate Parliament and the Guardian Council in both numbers and influence, and, once approved by these two bodies, these bills will become law.