The death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police in September for not wearing the hijab properly was a fracturing point, prompting Iranian women to come on to the streets en masse to protest the regime’s violence and injustice.
But our understanding of these protests should not be narrowly restricted to the rights of women. More broadly, they are a reaction to the absence of democracy and the rule of law in Iran on one hand, and the abuse of power and frequent human rights violations on the other.
One of the biggest problems for Iranian people is built in to the way the Islamic Republic operates, with the lack of a clear separation of powers, democracy and accountability. Iran’s judiciary is not independent of the regime, where power is constitutionally concentrated in one person: the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is not answerable to any higher authority or legal or political mechanism. He doesn’t face a public vote.
