Tehran, Iran – Iran is yet to file charges against a female student who was arrested after she removed her clothes at a university, a government spokeswoman said.
The young woman stripped to her underwear in public on a campus of the Islamic Azad University in northwestern Tehran on Saturday, in an act perceived by human rights advocates, Amnesty International and some social media users as a protest against Iran’s mandatory Islamic dress code.
She was detained by university security and transported to a police station.
An official from the university and some local media characterised the woman as suffering from mental illness.
Local media also shared a clip that purported to show the former husband of the young woman. The man, whose face was blurred out, could be heard crying and saying she suffers from mental issues and is a mother of two children.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify the footage.
On Tuesday, Fatemeh Mohajerani, the first woman spokesperson of an Iranian government since the 1979 Iranian revolution, told the reformist Ham-Mihan daily newspaper that the woman was taken from a police station to a facility to receive treatment.
“No judicial case has been opened for this student. The government has a social view to this issue, rather than a security view. We will try to resolve the issue of this student as an individual who is facing a problem,” she said.
The government spokeswoman added that she can return to the university in the future if it is decided that she is suffering from a mental issue. The situation is pending a decision by authorities, according to Mohajerani.
She said the reason the university was so quick to announce that the woman had a mental illness was likely that they had a file on her, after a university-wide psychiatric evaluation programme implemented at an earlier stage.
Narges Mohammadi, the jailed Iranian human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said in a statement that the woman’s move was a show of “defiance” to a system that has oppressed women and their bodies.
Amnesty International described the act as a “protest against abusive enforcement of compulsory hijab by security officials” at the university.
The organisation said she must be protected from any potential ill-treatment, and allegations of a violent arrest must be evaluated as part of an independent and impartial investigation.
The incident comes as the issue of mandatory hijab remains a hot-button subject in Iran in the aftermath of months of nationwide protests in 2022 and 2023 that erupted after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini.
The 22-year-old Kurdish woman was arrested in Tehran for allegedly not fully adhering to the strict dress code that has been in place since shortly after the 1979 revolution. Hundreds were killed during the protests.
France, which had adopted more confrontational rhetoric towards the Iranian establishment during the protests than most Western countries by calling them a “revolution”, said on Tuesday that it was “closely following” the case of the student.
“I hail the courage of this young woman who demonstrated her resistance and turned herself into an icon for the women’s struggle in Iran,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told broadcaster France 2.
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