Iran Policy: Imperfectly-Veiled Women Will Have Cars Confiscated

Iran’s chief of police announced Wednesday that the Islamic Republic will crack down on women who go rogue and do things such as driving without a proper head covering (hijab).

“If a (female) driver in a car is poorly veiled or has taken her veil off, the vehicle will be seized in accordance with the law,” General Teymour Hosseini, the Tehran police chief, told state-run ISNA news.

And if women want to get their vehicles back, they need to obtain court paperwork clearing them to drive their own cars, he added.

The news comes amid Iranian parliamentarians ranting about the issue this week in the Majlis (Iranian Parliament).

“Unfortunately, some streets of the capital have come to resemble fashion salons,” commented Iran’s chief of the judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larjani, adding that too much “tolerance” has created the situation at hand.

Women have been forced to wear the veil since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which installed a theocratic dictator Ayatollah with unlimited power.

“One of the first acts of this regime was to impose compulsory veiling and suppress a huge protest on March 8, 1979 to mark International Women’s day,” Maryam Namazie, a women’s rights activist, told the International Business Times.

However, there has been some pushback from expat Iranian women’s rights groups

In 2014, an Iranian woman launched what has become a wildly popular Facebook page, calling for women to ditch their hijab to express their rights. The page, called My Stealthy Freedom, now has over 877,000 “likes.”