May 10, 2024
An Iranian court has sentenced a dissident rapper to death, an unprecedented action. The rapper, Toomaj Salehi, has already been jailed more than a year and a half for supporting protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini.
Salehi was sentenced to death on the charge of “corruption on earth,” the artist’s lawyer, Amir Raisian, said, according to the reformist daily Sharq. That is a Qoranic offense often applied to major dissidents the regime wishes to eliminate.
But the real stunner was that the Supreme Court had earlier overturned Salehi’s death sentence and sent the case back to the trial court, which ignored the Supreme Court and re-instated the death sentence. The Supreme Court had said the crimes committed by the rapper were not so bad as to warrant the death penalty.
Salehi, 33, was arrested in October 2022 after publicly backing the wave of demonstrations that erupted a month earlier, triggered by the death in cus tody of 22-year-old Amini, an Iranian Kurd detained for violating the dress code. The Revolutionary Court also convicted Salehi of “assistance in sedition, assembly and collusion, propaganda against the system and calling for riots,” Raisian said.
The nation’s Supreme Court reviewed the case and issued a ruling to the lower court to “remove flaws in the sentence,” Raisian said. However, the lower court had, “in an unprecedented move, emphasized its independence and did not implement the Supreme Court’s ruling,” according to Raisian.
The trial court a Revolutionary Court, not part of the basic judicial system said what the Supreme Court told it was basically “advice” and not binding. It stressed what it called the “independence” of trial courts. Raisian called this “strange.” Under the Constitution, the Supreme Court automatically reviews all death sentences.
Raisian said it was also “strange” that in addition to the death sentence, the trial court forbade Salehi from leaving the country for two years, banned him from artistic activities for two years, and required him to attend behavior management classes.
Raisian said that Salehi “will certainly appeal against the sentence.” “The fact is that the verdict of the court has clear legal conflicts,” the lawyer was quoted as saying. “The contradiction with the ruling of the Supreme Court is considered the most important and at the same time the strangest part of this ruling.”
Nine men have been executed in protest-related cases involving killing and other violence against security forces since Amini’s death. But a few days after Salehi’s sentence was announced, the lawyer for Mahmud Mehrabi, another protester not believed to have been accused of any acts of violence, was sentenced to death for “corruption on earth,” his lawyer said.
