They still want a regime change.’ Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh says the anger behind Iran’s protests remains

They still want a regime change.’ Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh says the anger behind Iran’s protests remains

CNN-Feb 8th2023

By Sana Noor Haq, CNN

A prominent Iranian human rights lawyer has told CNN that while a brutal state crackdown has succeeded in quieting the demonstrations that gripped the country for months, many Iranians still want regime change.

In an exclusive interview Wednesday from her home in Tehran, Nasrin Sotoudeh told CNN’s Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour that, “the protests have somewhat died down, but that doesn’t mean that the people are no longer angry … they constantly want and still want a regime change. They want a referendum.”

Sotoudeh, renowned around the world for advocating for the rights of women, children and activists in Iran, is currently on medical furlough from jail, after being sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes in March 2019.

Nationwide protests rocked Iran last fall, as decades of bitterness over the regime’s treatment of women and other issues boiled over after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the country’s so-called morality police.

Authorities violently repressed the months-long movement, which had posed one of the biggest domestic threats to Iran’s ruling clerical regime in more than a decade.

Still, Sotoudeh emphasizes that the protest movement endures. “Official authorities are trying to flex their muscles more, they’re trying to show their strength a lot more than before, but civil disobedience continues and many women courageously take to the streets.”

‘Veil to hide the bruises’

Figures like Sotoudeh, who have battled against Iran’s mandatory hijab wearing for women, have been under increased government scrutiny since the uprising.

The protests exploded into a full-fledged women’s rights movement against the country’s headscarf laws after the death of Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman who was detained for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.

Sotoudeh compared Iran’s mandatory hijab laws to those applied by other authoritarian regimes in countries including Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned women attending universities and working with non-governmental organizations.

“This issue really hurt the collective conscience of the Iranian people, because for many years the Iranian people had suffered, and one of the main sufferings was that half the population was constantly being harassed because of their gender, because of their body,” she said.

“I do believe that both in Iran and in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, hijab is being used as a means of exerting violence and meting out violence against women, bruising and hurting women, and then covering them in a veil to hide all the bruises and the hurt.”