Prominent Rights Activist To Receive Lashes, Serve Time After Her Arrest
British Iranian journalist and political analyst
Iranian rights activist Narges Mohammadi said Wednesday she faces an outstanding sentence of 80 lashes and 30 months’ jail after she was arrested on Tuesday.
Mohammadi called her husband, who lives in France, from Evin prison telling him that she was in solitary confinement. Rahman wrote later in a Twitter post that the line had been cut when Mohammadi insisted that she would not allow the lashing.
According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), Mohammadi was arrested Tuesday at a death anniversary ceremony at a cemetery in Karaj, west of Tehran, for Ebrahim Ketabdar, shot dead by security forces during 2019 protests, reportedly while shopping.
In a video posted to Twitter, Ketabdar's mother claimed security beat Mohammadi, dragged her into their vehicle and took her away. Another video posted on Twitter showed her protesting to the security forces over Mohammadi’s arrest amid chants of "Down with the Dictator."
Solitary cell
Former political prisoner Arash Sadeghi in a tweet Wednesday said Mohammadi was being held in “a solitary cell in a ward run by the Revolutionary Guards.”
"Narges Mohammadi and Atena Daemi's [an anti-capital punishment campaigner] sentencing to lashes is for their protest against people's massacre in November 2019,” Sadeghi tweeted. “Let's not remain silent against this inhumane sentence.”
The outstanding convictions date to July, when Mohammadi was convicted on charges of "propaganda against the Islamic Republic" for issuing a statement against the death penalty and "disobeying the prison governor and authorities." Mohammadi claimed this resulted from what she claimed was a prison governor's inappropriate behavior that amounted to sexual harassment.
Mohammadi refused to attend her trial in March having said in an open letter the previous month that she would refuse to accept any sentence passed by the court. She then refused a summons to serve the sentence in September.
Cofounder and chair of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, Mohammadi has been to jail several times over the past two decades. She was freed from Evin September 2020 after serving five and half years when she had no contact with her husband and children for long stretches.
She was detained twice before this year, once for participating in a rally in front of the interior ministry during week-long water protests in Khuzestan and again at an anti-Taliban rally outside the Pakistan embassy in Tehran in September. She was freed both times after a few hours.
