control and sexuality

Iran– and in a few cases has obtained acquittals or commutations. Secondly, it has insertedhuman rights concerns into the very heart of the criminal justice system and engagedhardliners and members of the Judiciary in debate. Campaign members, such as Shadi Sadrand the Network of Volunteer Lawyers, took the Judiciary to task and played a central rolein this debate, which has spilled over into the print media. Activists and journalists, suchAsieh Amini and Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, exposed the injustices that the impositionof classical Islamic legal punishments entail in practice. In so doing, they have openedup one of the fault lines in the Islamic Republic, putting the hardliners on the defensiveand showing how such punishments are so offensive to contemporary sensibilities andnotions of criminal justice that the old fiqh arguments and rationales have lost their powerto convince.The reformists – now ousted from the judiciary and Parliament – joined the debate andquestioned the legitimacy of stoning on religious grounds. They have revealed thatAyatollah Khomeini issued a decree to the judiciary in 1982 advising that stoning aspunishment should not be implemented (Terman 2007). In July 2007, Zanan magazinepublished a special dossier on stoning. These debates had an impact on the new CriminalCode that was being drafted at the time, as evident in the recurrent argument that is putforward to justify the reform of fiqh notions of crime and punishment: the notion thatstoning might be a ‘disgrace to Islam’ is an admission that it is abhorrent to the public. Asdiscussed earlier, the new version of the Criminal Code, approved by Parliament in 2008,not only plays down stoning but also in effect allows for its replacement by alternativepunishments.Having lost the public debate, Ahmadinejad’s government resorted to intimidationand violence. On 4 March 2007, a group of women’s rights activists gathered in frontof the court where their colleagues were on trial for organising the June 2006 rally. Thesecurity forces harassed them and arrested 33, the leading women’s rights activists inthe country; all were released within days, apart from Abbasgholizadeh and Sadr, whowere kept in solitary confinement for over two weeks and then released on heavy bailafter their offices had been raided and closed down. In April 2007, the police launchedan unprecedented aggressive drive to control women’s presence in public space. Theinitiative – called Moral Security Plan – involved female police in full chador, and targetedyoung women sporting the new fashion of hijab, consisting of tight tunics, short trousersand narrow scarves, whom the authorities call ‘mannequins’. Thousands of women werearrested in big cities, with many hundreds of thousands receiving verbal warnings. InJanuary 2008 the government closed Zanan magazine for ‘blackening the authorities’by reporting incidents of militia forces raping girls they had arrested on the pretext of‘bad hijab’.Instead of silencing reformists and human rights and women’s activists, Ahmadinejad’sgovernment has succeeded only in uniting them and radicalising their demands. Reformistand women’s websites, now the only forums where activists could still interact, continued109