Dr. Hossein Jahansouz
The Islamic Republic governs like a warden. It does not merely write rules. It turns streets, schools, factories, and the internet into zones of inspection and punishment. Three pillars hold up this carceral order: digital surveillance, a coercive police, prosecutor, and court pipeline, and a death-penalty machine that signals power through fear.
After 2022, the state scaled up cameras, license plate readers, facial recognition, drones, and tip-off apps to track unveiled women and anyone it brands deviant. These tools do more than police dress. They map movement, target livelihoods, and monitor speech. Businesses and citizens are pushed to report one another, transforming social life into an extension of the security state. The 2024 and 2025 hijab hardline push rides this infrastructure. It is not morality policing. It is platformed control.
The pipeline that follows is brutal and efficient. Arrests, incommunicado detentions, torture-tainted confessions, and closed trials have been documented since the 2022 uprising. Mahsa Jina Amini’s death was caused by physical violence, and crimes against humanity including murder, persecution, and sexual violence were committed during the crackdown. Domestic monitors report continuing waves of summonses, raids, and prosecutions through late 2024 and 2025.
Executions are the regime’s loudest message. The number of hangings has surged to record levels, with minorities hit hardest and drug-related and political cases spiking. By September 2025, more than a thousand people had been executed amid gross violations of due process. New protest-linked death sentences keep flowing from sham trials. The logic is simple: dissent equals death.
Mandatory hijab sits at the center of this model. It is not about cloth. It is a daily test of sovereignty: the state over the citizen, men over women, ideology over autonomy. After the 2022 uprising delegitimized the morality police, the regime shifted from street squads to code and contracts. Cameras identify. Platforms punish. Fines, service suspensions, license blocks, and arrests follow. The state orders businesses and platform operators to police compliance. Even drones are deployed on highways and in public spaces.
The social harm is gendered and deliberate. Survivors report sexual violence in detention, threats to reputation, employment bans, and financial coercion to force obedience. Even insiders warned in 2024 and 2025 that the new hijab law’s surveillance mandates are unenforceable and explosive. Women’s visible defiance exposes a core weakness. The regime cannot command consent, so it multiplies control.
Killing dissent goes far beyond women’s bodies. Teachers’ unions, workers, journalists, artists, and environmental defenders are targeted because they organize truth and solidarity. Teachers face raids, firings, interrogations, and prison for peaceful union activity. Wage protests are prosecuted as security threats. Journalists, more than a hundred in 2024 alone, are charged, harassed, and silenced. Families of detainees are pressured to keep quiet. Environmentalists who document mismanagement are surveilled and tried on spurious national security grounds. Ecosystems become classified, and scientists become suspects. Ethnic and religious minorities including Baluch, Kurdish, Ahwazi Arab, and Sunni communities bear a disproportionate share of executions and prosecutions.
Impunity is policy. UN mechanisms are blocked. Independent investigations into killings, torture, and sexual violence are refused. New laws expand surveillance and punishment rather than justice and redress.
To see why this holds, look at the system as a whole. First, everyday life is securitized. Education, health, urban planning, and the environment are recast as arenas of threat. A teacher becomes an agitator. A pollution monitor becomes a spy. A woman’s autonomy becomes a public order crime. Second, enforcement is horizontalized. Banks, telecoms, ride hailing apps, platforms, shops, and even bystanders are deputized. This lowers the cost of repression and raises the psychological cost of living because the watcher could be your neighbor or your phone. Third, courts convert repression into paperwork. Tortured confessions and national security catchalls turn protest into terrorism and journalism into espionage. Executions become spectacle and warning. Fourth, IRGC intelligence fuses and directs it all, overriding civilian oversight and installing enforcement nodes across ministries and municipalities. Civil society is treated not as an interlocutor but as an enemy to disrupt and incapacitate. Fifth, the death penalty supplies constant background terror. Iran is now the world’s leading executioner after China, with a sharp escalation in 2024 and 2025.
Yet repression breeds fragility. Hijab enforcement needs mass compliance to project power. Visible noncompliance forces escalation to surveillance and collective punishment, which corrodes cooperation even among regime loyalists. Public splits over the hijab bill, warnings about economic and social backlash, and stubborn everyday defiance reveal diminishing returns on coercion.
International scrutiny matters. In 2025, UN mandates were renewed and expanded, strengthening documentation and opening paths for accountability through universal jurisdiction cases, targeted sanctions, and evidence preservation. Inside and outside Iran, civil society keeps producing rigorous records that future justice will need.
Hossein Jahansouz is biochemist and a leading scientist and industry executive in the United States for vver three decades.