Mahsa Jina Amini's Legacy and the Women the Islamic Republic of Iran Fears Most
Three years after Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in police custody, Iranian women keep pushing back against state control, even as the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) detains more women’s rights defenders (WHRDs) than almost any other country in the world. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement she sparked has transformed grief into defiance: many women now risk imprisonment, and growing numbers openly refuse compulsory veiling. The question is whether the women the IRI fears most, those it imprisons at unprecedented rates, represent a threat the regime can contain or one that reveals its growing limitations.
Iran: A Statistical Outlier in Global Repression of Women's Rights
Arbitrary detention has long been one of the main tools governments use to silence human rights defenders. Yet, until recently, there was no systematic global documentation of this practice. The SOS-Defenders platform, launched in December 2024, addresses this gap by verifying and recording cases of detained HRDs across 19 countries, making visible the scale and patterns of repression. While the database cannot capture every case, as many remain hidden due to fear of reprisals or lack of access, it makes visible the broader patterns of repression. One stands out above all: the IRI’s unusually severe repression on WHRDs.
Of the 136 female HRDs verified in the database, 29% are currently detained in Iran. In 2024, Iran accounted for over 30% of all new cases globally, making it the country with the highest number of new detentions and, by a large margin, the most women defenders. Iran, together with Afghanistan and Saudia Arabia, is also one of the few countries in the database where men are imprisoned for defending women’s rights, which indicates that the Iranian government regards gender equality as a direct threat. And it is one of only three countries where female HRDs face the death penalty, including labor and women’s rights activist Sharifeh Mohammadi, who was resentenced to death in February 2025 after an unfair trial and credible reports of torture.
Conditions for women defenders in Iran’s prisons are deliberately cruel. Reports of torture and other ill-treatment are widespread. Houra Nikbakht, Samaneh Asghari, and Nasrin Hasani have each spent months in solitary confinement without family contact. Raheleh Rahemi Pour, an elderly activist with a brain tumor and other serious health conditions, has been denied access to medical care. Similarly, Fatemeh Sepehri, a prominent political activist in her sixties, with urgent medical needs is serving a sentence of 37 years and 6 months. Others, like Anisha Asadollahi and Maryam Jalal Hosseini, face harassment, denial of family visits, or threats of transfers to harsher facilities. Shakila Monfared, sentenced to over 16 years for her social media activism, has resorted to repeated hunger strikes to protest prison conditions.
The charges themselves reveal how the IRI views women’s rights activism. Alongside standard accusations like “anti-government propaganda”, women defenders are targeted with “blasphemy” charges. The blasphemy charge is significant because it is applied to women’s rights activists beyond just hijab cases, meaning that women’s rights advocacy per se is seen as blasphemous. Activists such as Vida Rabbani, imprisoned for peaceful writings and critiques of government policy, and Atena Farghadani, an artist whose protest drawings highlight the repression of political prisoners and children’s rights, demonstrate that the regime denies them any space within the permissible political order. Calling this blasphemy delegitimises not just the person, but the very concept of women’s equality.
When Enforcement Fails: Policy Contradictions and Abandoned Laws
The IRI’s heavy crackdown on WHRDs suggests a government that feels it must use extreme measures to maintain control. Such dramatic escalation often signals that a regime’s usual control mechanisms are weakening. The clearest sign came in September 2024, when the government proposed a much stricter hijab law. Since the 1979 revolution, compulsory hijab has been more than a dress code; it has been a cornerstone of the IRI’s ideological authority. The bill would have doubled fines and introduced prison sentences of up to three years for repeat offenders. However, this legislation was never implemented. Its enforcement was paused by the National Security Council, after President Massoud Pezeshkian described it as ambiguous and in need of revision.
This happened alongside other controversial policies. The government launched Operation Noor with more surveillance and morality police patrols. Shortly after, it introduced the Nazer mobile application so citizens could report hijab violations. Yet, these measures appeared precisely when public compliance seemed to be declining. Some reports suggest that fewer women are wearing the hijab than at any point in recent decades. The gap between what the government wants to enforce and what it can actually implement may be growing wider.
Is Iran about to Lose this Battle?
Mahsa Jina Amini’s death transformed individual tragedy into collective resistance. To grasp the scale of that resistance, we need more than isolated stories, we need evidence that captures broader patterns. Verified data now reveal what individual cases could not: nearly half of all recorded global detentions of women human rights defenders in 2024 took place in Iran. This makes the country a striking outlier in repression, impossible to dismiss as a local problem. The figures show a regime that detains women at rates unmatched elsewhere, that hands down extreme sentences to elderly activists in poor health and at the same time is unable to enforce strict hijab rules. The extreme repressive measures are designed to assert authority. Yet, paradoxically, they also expose the challenges the state faces in maintaining control. The women the state fears most, from Mahsa Jina Amini to those continuing to resist from inside prison, seem to expose the limits of the regime’s reach.
