Mahsa Zhina Amini

Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran in September 2022 and her death produced the largest sustained protests in Iran since the revolution. She was twenty-two, a Kurd from Saqqez in the west, and was visiting the capital with her family when the guidance patrol - the morality police - stopped her outside a metro station for wearing her hijab improperly. She was taken to a detention centre for a re-education class, collapsed there, and died in hospital three days later without regaining consciousness. The authorities said she had a pre-existing heart condition; her family said she was healthy and that she had been beaten, and photographs of her in the hospital bed circulated immediately. Her Kurdish name was Zhina, which Iranian law did not permit on a birth certificate, so she was registered as Mahsa - a detail that carried its own meaning for Kurds. The protests began at her funeral in Saqqez with the Kurdish slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadi - Woman, Life, Freedom - and spread to every province and to universities and schools, with women removing and burning headscarves in public. The crackdown killed at least five hundred people and detained some twenty thousand, and several protesters were executed. The morality police were reported disbanded and then were not. Her father said he was not allowed to see her body properly and that the family was pressured over the funeral. The slogan from her graveside had come out of the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey and Syria years earlier and reached the whole of Iran through her death. The European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov Prize in 2023, and the security services detained her family to stop them travelling to receive it.

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