The time of rebellion has come to an end – for the time being. Long gone are the protesters marching, chanting and dancing under the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ banner. Students no longer stand defiant on the streets, heads uncovered.

Iran’s theocratic regime appears to have overcome the fiercest challenge it’s faced in its 40-plus years, leaving more than 500 dead in its wake. And it hasn’t let its guard down: as the world moves on to the next tragedy, repression continues to prevent the embers of rebellion reigniting.

Unrelenting repression

The wave of protest against the theocratic regime started on 16 September 2022 and continued for far longer than anyone could have predicted. By the one-year mark, however, it had all but died down, its unprecedented scale and reach superseded by the unparalleled brutality of the crackdown.

For months on end, peaceful protesters were repeatedly dispersed by force. As they kept coming back, their demands for freedom to dress as they wish escalating into calls for the downfall of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repression intensified accordingly. Live ammunition was soon used against students, including children.

The regime murdered hundreds of protesters, injured thousands and arrested tens of thousands. It subjected many to torture, sexual abuse and denial of medical treatment while in detention.

It weaponised the criminal justice system against them, holding express trials behind closed doors in ‘revolutionary courts’ presided over by clerics, with zero procedural guarantees. It sentenced hundreds – including journalists – to years in jail and handed out several death sentences, with at least seven executions carried out by May 2023. According to the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Iran, Javaid Rehman, some of the human rights violations committed by the regime could constitute crimes against humanity under international law.

Shortly after the first anniversary of the protests, on 6 October, it was announced that the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned Iranian woman activist with 20 years of struggle for democracy, human rights and women’s rights under her belt. Over the years, she’d been arrested 13 times, sentenced to 31 years in prison and 154 lashes, and been in prison three times. She was behind bars when she received the news. Her children travelled to Oslo to receive the award on her behalf and convey her message to the world.

Legitimacy lost

Battered but far from toppled, the Iranian regime views upcoming legislative elections as part of its road to recovery. On 1 March 2024, people will be called on to vote for all 290 members of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. The key battle will be over turnout, which was already down to 42 per cent in 2020 – the lowest since the 1979 revolution. That record could be shattered, with opposition and reformists – including former lawmaker Faezeh Hashemi, currently serving a five-year sentence for ‘propaganda against the regime’ and participating in protests – calling for abstention or boycott.

The theocratic regime may have regained control of the streets – but not of people’s minds. At the peak of protests, women were out in the open without their hijabs for the first time in decades. Once street protests were quelled, many refused to resubmit to the old rules. Civil disobedience became subtler, focused on small daily acts of defiance consisting in the display of slightly ‘improper’ hair, dress or behaviour.

Two months before the protests’ first anniversary, afraid that mobilisation would resume, the theocratic regime put back on the streets the morality police whose intervention had resulted in Jina Mahsa Amini’s death. Conservatives proposed a new ‘hijab and chastity’ law that would impose a stricter dress code and harsher penalties, including lashes, heavy fines and prison sentences of up to 10 years for violations – an attempt to consolidate what UN experts have described as a regime of gender apartheid.

New victims weren’t long in coming. On 1 October, barely a year after Mahsa Amini’s death, 17-year-old high school student Armita Garawand fell unconscious on the platform of a Tehran metro station under suspicious circumstances. It was reported that she’d been assaulted by a hijab enforcer for not wearing a headscarf. The authorities, however, claimed she’d suffered a medical incident, and paraded friends and family on national TV in support of their statements. Armita remained in a coma for 28 days, under the custody of security forces who made sure nobody recorded videos and friends and family members didn’t speak to independent media. Journalists who reported from the hospital faced harsh reprisals.

Armita died on 28 October, and at her burial mourners were assaulted and dozens were arrested, including well-known human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh.

Gender apartheid

In their condemnation of the tightening of regulations on women’s conduct and appearance in Iran, UN human rights experts echoed an initiative launched by a group of Afghan and Iranian women earlier in the year, on International Women’s Day – the End Gender Apartheid campaign.

Along with their peers under Taliban rule, Iranian women want the world to recognise – and condemn – the regime of the ayatollahs as one of gender apartheid. They want the 1973 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, which so far applies only to racial hierarchies, extended to gender. They want this specific and extreme form of gender-based exclusion to be codified as a crime under international law so that those responsible can be prosecuted and punished.

The campaign makes three major demands to states: that they amplify and centre the experiences of women living under gender apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran; make statements, issue resolutions and shape policy responses to condemn Afghanistan and Iran’s gender apartheid regimes; and interpret or expand the legal definition of apartheid under international and national laws to include severe forms of institutionalised gender‑based discrimination.

Succession

Along with the parliamentary elections, in March 2024 Iran will hold elections for the Council of Experts, the body of clerics that appoints Iran’s Supreme Leader. The Council has recently faced criticism for its lax oversight of the 84-year-old Supreme Leader’s performance, and might have to step in relatively soon.

In power since 1989, Khamenei – Iran’s second Supreme Leader – is in a race against the clock. Bent on ensuring that the theocracy he largely built stands strong after he’s gone, he’s preparing his 54-year-old second son to succeed him. But the ongoing economic crisis may conspire against his plans. The cumulative impacts of international sanctions, fluctuating oil prices, mismanagement and rampant corruption have fuelled inflation and unemployment, and discontent runs high.

To prevent accumulated grievances from translating into mass protest, the regime will likely try to tread a fine line between displaying indestructible power and offering minor concessions, for instance, on young people’s dress and behaviour codes.

The spotlight shifts

When the protests erupted and for some time afterwards, international support poured in. People around the world showed solidarity with Iranian women and called on their governments to act. Early on, the USA imposed sanctions on the morality police and several senior leaders of the force and other security agencies. New sanctions by the European Union, UK and USA were announced on the eve of the anniversary of the protests, 15 September, International Day of Democracy.

There was hope that denunciations of Iran’s gender apartheid regime would be accompanied by some form of action to hold those responsible to account. Civil society called for the creation of a dedicated accountability mechanism to work alongside the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran.

But on 7 October, as Armita lay in a coma in a hospital bed, the paramilitary wings of Hamas launched their attacks into Israeli territory, and global attention shifted to the terrorist outrage and Israel’s ensuing murderous campaign of revenge. As a key source of support for Hamas, Iran was far from out of the equation – but condemnation of theocracy and gender apartheid now took a back seat to geopolitical considerations.

Khamenei publicly stated that Iran wasn’t involved in the 7 October attacks, and although he reiterated Iran’s political and moral support for Hamas, he reportedly told Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that Iran wouldn’t directly intervene in the conflict unless it was attacked by Israel or the USA. But Iran’s leadership of the anti-Israeli and anti-western ‘Axis of Resistance’ and the key role it can play in either expanding or limiting the scope of the conflict means it will be included in any attempt to redefine the regional order, and could well emerge stronger.

Amid the chaos and in the search for security, the international community might be increasingly willing to look the other way. Iran’s search for international respectability saw a milestone in November, when it took advantage of other states’ lack of interest to claim the chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s Social Forum. True, the result was a largely empty room – but it remains the case that Iran succeeded in occupying institutional space to whitewash its blood-soaked image.

This mustn’t be allowed to happen. Iranian women mustn’t be left to their own devices. Iranian pro-democracy and human rights activists, both inside and outside Iran, need the support of the international community if they’re to have any chance.