A young woman started working at Sarzamineh Shadi, also known as the Land of Happiness. It is an indoor theme park located east of Tehran, the capital of Iran. According to numerous reports in Iranian media, the amusement park was shut down after a picture of her without a headscarf went viral on social media. According to reports, Tehran’s prosecutors have started an inquiry.
Shaparak Shajarizadeh is accustomed to using the threat of business closure as leverage to get customers to follow Iran’s stringent clothing regulations for women. She stopped donning a hijab in 2017 because she sees it as a representation of governmental persecution. She also remembers restaurant proprietors pressing her to wear a head scarf out of fear of the police.
Shajarizadeh, who left Iran for Canada in 2018 after being detained three times for disobeying the hijab ban, is concerned that face recognition algorithms could potentially single out women like the amusement park employee in addition to traditional police work.
The head of an Iranian government agency that upholds morality law stated in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws,” after Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to enforce hijab law. He said it would be possible to identify people by matching faces to a national identity database to issue fines and make arrests.
22-year-old passed away after getting detained by the morality police of Iran
A 22-year-old Kurd called Jina Mahsa Amini passed away after being detained by Iran’s morality police for failing to fasten her hijab enough two weeks later. Her passing prompted famous demonstrations against women’s dress codes, resulting in over 500 fatalities and an estimated 19,000 arrests. Shajarizadeh and others keeping an eye on the protests have observed that certain protesters including women who are cited for not donning a hijab are challenged by police days after a claimed incident. Many others, she claims, have not been detained on the streets. A day or two later, they were detained at their houses.
Shajarizadeh and others worry that the trend suggests face recognition is already in use, possibly marking the first known case of a government utilising face recognition to enforce a dress code on women based on religious conviction, even if there are other ways women may have been recognised.
Mahsa Alimardani, who studies Iran’s freedom of speech at the University of Oxford, recently learned of tales of Iranian women obtaining mail-order tickets for breaking the hijab rule even though they had never interacted with a law enforcement official. According to Alimardani, the Iranian government has spent years developing a computerized monitoring system.
Ebrahim Raisi extended the prohibitions on the hijab
The nation’s national identification database, created in 2015, contains biometric information, including face scans, and is used to create national ID cards and identify persons that the government deems rebels.
In accordance with objectives for modernity, Iranian law from decades ago mandated women to remove their headscarves, with authorities occasionally coercing them to do so. However, when the nation became a theocracy in 1979, wearing a headscarf became required.
In August, Ebrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, expanded the prohibitions on the hijab and chastity. According to a database kept by the NGO United for Iran of more than 5,000 prisoners since 2011, breaking hijab laws was frequently followed by years in prison. Repeat offenders risk years in prison or mandatory morality courses. Women believed to be breaking the law may not be allowed to use public transportation, banks, or other crucial government services.
