Sabzevar Prosecutor’s Office: Women Riding Motorcycles and Dog Walking Will Be Confronted

The public relations office of the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office of Sabzevar has issued a notice announcing the intensification of judicial and law enforcement crackdowns on what it termed “norm-breaking.” It declared that the police and judiciary will confront instances including “failure to observe the religious hijab, providing services to individuals without hijab, women riding motorcycles, and walking dogs in public thoroughfares.”

In this notice, the hijab and “Islamic-Iranian attire” are presented as a “religious, legal, and social obligation,” and citizens are requested to report such instances to the police and law enforcement authorities. The Sabzevar Prosecutor’s Office emphasized that upon witnessing or receiving reports concerning these matters, action will be taken “with decisiveness and without leniency.”

The judicial body also called upon citizens to cooperate with the responsible institutions in implementing what it described as “safeguarding public rights and maintaining social order and morality,” and to submit their reports to the police or emergency law enforcement centers.

The publication of this notice comes at a time when, over the past months and amid military conflicts and wartime conditions, numerous images and reports were published showing women without the state-approved hijab participating in nightly pro-regime rallies and appearing in programs broadcast by official media and the Islamic Republic’s propaganda apparatus. This phenomenon was interpreted by critics as a sign of a practical relaxation of strict hijab enforcement.

However, concurrent with the relative de-escalation of military tensions, the rising probability of Iran and the United States reaching an agreement, and the gradual return to normal conditions, it appears that judicial and law enforcement institutions have once again placed the implementation of policies related to the mandatory hijab and the control of citizens’ lifestyles at the top of their agenda.

A significant portion of the provisions in the Sabzevar Prosecutor’s Office notice, including the public invitation to report on citizens’ attire and conduct, goes beyond routine law enforcement crackdowns and effectively turns ordinary citizens into a mechanism for social surveillance and the control of daily life.