Iran’s President Massoud Pezheskian has vowed to work to ensure that the morality police do not “harass” women who do not wear the mandatory headscarf in public, he said today, the second anniversary of the death of Mahsha Amini while in custody.

“The morality police are not supposed to confront (the women), I will make sure they are not disturbed,” the reformist president said in Tehran during his first press conference since his election in July.

Pezeskian made these statements two years after the death, on September 16, 2022, of Maksha Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, who was arrested by the morality police for not respecting the strict dress code imposed on women in Iran.

“Even the attorney general had stated that (these police officers) had no right to confront” the women, the president added.

During the election campaign, Pezeskian had promised to take the morality police, a unit responsible for overseeing how women wear the mandatory headscarf, off the streets.

Mahsha Amini’s death sparked a major protest movement in Iran, with several hundred dead and thousands arrested.

Authorities called the protests “riots” orchestrated by Western countries.

Pezeskian, then a member of the Iranian parliament, had strongly criticized the police in September 2022 over the death of Makhsa Amini.

Today, the Iranian president also said his government is trying to ease draconian restrictions imposed on the internet, especially social media.

During the 2022 protests, Iran blocked Instagram and WhatsApp, the most used apps after blocking YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and Tiktok platforms in recent years.