The Iranian Writers’ Association published an important statement Monday, August 1, 2022 in the Farsi news site Akhbar Rooz. Below is IEC’s unofficial translation.

For more than forty years, the government has been violating the most basic rights of women and responding to their every protest and disobedience with humiliation and organized violence and filing cases. Women who have seen their lives from the most private to the most public areas dominated by the regime's misogynistic culture and laws, have taken steps and opened ways to break this space with their individual and collective efforts. But this constant struggle has not reduced the naked violence of the government against women.

On July 31, the government added another black page to its record, and as it has many other times, it turned to confession and manipulation of public opinion. When the detention of Sepideh Rashno, the poet and writer, had reached the 14th day, the news channels of the Islamic Republic of Iran aired the video of her forced confession. The method that has always been repeated with the intention of discrediting the protest and intimidating the protesters by the government: forcing the oppressed to sit in front of the camera and showing the suffocation by the ruler. Now, however, the widespread anger and reaction of the people showed that this tactic is more ineffective than before.

Earlier, a video was published on the internet that showed a "famous person" [IEC: well-known female IRI agent who bullies women for not properly covering their hair in public] on the bus being aggressive to a woman under the pretext of covering up, causing that women and other women on the bus to defend themselves in protest. While filming the protesting woman, she threatens to send the video to the "Army". Shortly after the wide distribution of this video on social networks, it was found out that the woman who protested was Sepideh Rashno, and she was arrested by the security officers and taken to an unknown place. At the same time, the media of the government also began to file and make accusations and attributed this protest, like countless other protests, to "external factors".

In recent months, many such news items have been published after crossing the censorship barrier: the news that reveals both the increasing pressure on women and their resistance. The government has revived its old tools, and its officers, called "Moral Security Police", are busy oppressing women even more and depriving them of their safety.

The basis of this repression has been prepared before; The government, which has realized that in the absence of women's organizations and institutions, it is easier to violate the rights of "Sepidehs" and marginalize their voices, has violated the right of women to organize for years and has narrowed the space for activists in this field by filing cases, arresting and jailing.

The Iranian Writers Association, while defending the right to choose clothing, once again declares its support for women's right to organize and considers these arrests and forced confessions to be a continuation of the organized repression of women. Unconditional freedom is the right of Sepideh Rashno and all political and ideological prisoners.

Iran Writers’ Association, August 1, 2022