The German human rights commissioner who rejected Iranian female dissidents on Thursday reportedly sees the hijab as a form of empowerment for women.
Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad canceled a meeting with federal human rights commissioner Luise Amtsberg because Amtsberg did not want to publicize the details of the discussion.
The German magazine Stern reported in 2017 that the Green party politician had stated that the headscarf can be a symbol of liberation, adding “We forget that sometimes.”
Amtsberg wrote her master’s thesis on “Feminism in Islam: Using the example of the Palestinian women’s movement.”
Lawdan Bazargan, an Iranian-American political and human rights activist, told Iran International, “The hijab is an ideology, and like any ideological belief, it is linked to ‘interests’ and ‘power.’ The hijab serves a dual function; it privileges veiled women in Islamic societies while also helping to reproduce the system’s inherent patriarchy.”
Bazargan, who is currently working to remove Oberlin College’s Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, Iran’s former ambassador to the UN, added, “Ultimately, the hijab humiliates and disempowers women in society. It is shameful for a European woman, born and raised in a democratic country with liberal values, to idolize a symbol that oppresses millions of women, acting like a chain around their necks, suffocating them.”
Alinejad has long been an advocate against the hijab. The Islamic Republic of Iran imposed the mandatory hijab on women after the 1979 revolution in 1981.
Last week, Iran International reported that the clerical regime has seized the cars of individuals who violate the mandatory Hijab rules. In 2022, after dozens of Iranian women publicly removed their hijabs and sent the footage to Alinejad in New York, the clerical regime said women could face up to 10 years in prison for sending Alinjead the videos.
The backlash against Amtsberg’s attempt to silence the Iranian dissidents in Berlin has raised new concerns about the Green party’s friendly ties with the Islamic Republic.
Amtsberg’s Green party has a long history of holding public meetings with Iranian regime officials and politicians who have denied the Holocaust, defended the use of stoning for adultery, and been involved in the killing of Iranians.
In 2019, Germany’s best-selling newspaper Bild published a series of news articles and an editorial titled “Shame on the Bundestag” exposing then-Green party Bundestag vice president Claudia Roth’s enthusiastic reception of the former speaker of Iran’s ersatz parliament, Ali Larijani.
Larijani defended former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust at the 2009 Munich Security Conference.
Roth, currently Germany’s cultural minister, met in Tehran in 2010 with the former speaker’s brother, Mohammad-Javad Larijani, who defended the stoning of people who committed adultery. Mohammad-Javad Larijani served as the head of the Iranian Human Rights Council. A year before Roth’s meeting, he denied the Holocaust at a German foreign ministry-sponsored event in Berlin held close to the Holocaust memorial.
Roth also courted Manouchehr Mottaki who, while foreign minister, delivered a key speech at Tehran’s 2006 Holocaust denial conference.
The largely pro-Iranian politician, Roth, also high-fived then-Iranian ambassador to Germany, Reza Sheikh Attar, at the 2013 Munich Security Conference. Iranian Kurdish dissidents accused Attar of carrying out a massacre of Kurds during his tenure as governor of Kurdistan and West Azerbaijan provinces between 1980-1985.
German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has also faced heavy criticism from German opposition politicians and Iranian dissidents for her lenient stance towards Tehran. Baerbock refuses to label the IRGC as a terrorist organization. She claims to practice a “feminist foreign policy” but her inaction towards the IRGC—a US-designated terrorist organization dedicated to enforcing the mandatory hijab—has sparked criticism from Alinejad and other Iranian dissidents.