Iran to review hijab law after protests

Iranian authorities have said they will review a decades-old law that requires women to cover their heads, as the country struggles to quell more than two months of protests linked to the dress code.

The issue of whether the law needs changes is being worked on by the judiciary and the parliament, according to Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, Iran's attorney general.

He was quoted by an Iranian news agency, but he did not specify what could be modified in the law by the two bodies, which are both largely in the hands of conservatives.

The attorney general said on Wednesday that the review team will see the results in a week or two.

President Ebrahim Raisi said on Saturday that Iran's republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched.

He said that there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible.

Protests began on September 16 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin arrested by the morality police for allegedly flouting the sharia-based law.

Over the following weeks, demonstrators burned their head coverings and shouted anti-government slogans. After Amini's death, a growing number of women have not worn headscarves, particularly in Tehran's fashionable north.

In April 1983, the hijab headscarf became obligatory for all women in Iran, four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.

It remains a highly sensitive issue in a country where conservatives insist it should be compulsory, while reformists want to leave it up to individual choice.

In July this year, Raisi, an ultra-conservative, called for mobilisation of all state institutions to enforce the headscarf law. In September, Iran's main reformist party called for the mandatory hijab law to be rescinded.

The United States of Islamic Iran People Party, formed by relatives of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, demanded on Saturday that authorities prepare the legal elements that will lead to the cancellation of the mandatory hijab law. The opposition group said that the Islamic republic should officially announce the end of the activities of the morality police and allow peaceful demonstrations.

Iran accuses its sworn enemy the United States, including Britain, Israel and Kurdish groups based outside the country, of fomenting the street protests it calls riots. UN rights chief Volker Turk said last week 14,000 people had been arrested in the protests, and that at least 448 people had been killed by security forces in the ongoing nationwide protests.

Sportspeople, celebrities and journalists have been snared by the campaign of arrests.

The film star Mitra Hajjar, who was detained at her home on Saturday, was among the latest to be arrested, according to the reformist newspaper Shargh.