human-rights
29 September 2022
OFAC responds to Amini death with sanctions
The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (‘OFAC’) has responded to the death of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman who died shortly after being held by Iran’s Morality Police for not properly wearing the hijab, by announcing sanctions against that organisation and also against ‘seven senior leaders of Iran’s security organizations: the Morality Police, Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the Army’s Ground Forces, Basij Resistance Forces, and Law Enforcement Forces,’ which, it says, ‘oversee organizations that routinely employ violence to suppress peaceful protesters and members of Iranian civil society, political dissidents, women’s rights activists, and members of the Iranian Baha’i community.’
OFAC described the Morality Police as ‘the component of Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) tasked with enforcing the country’s laws against immodesty and societal vices. The LEF, the Iranian government’s main security apparatus dedicated to crowd control and protest suppression, played a key role in the crackdown on protesters in the aftermath of the disputed Iranian presidential election in 2009 and has been called upon to respond to multiple nationwide protests since then, including the November 2019 protests over gasoline price increases during which Iranian security forces killed at least hundreds of Iranian protestors.’
