October 14, 2016
A young female writer and activist has been sentenced to six years in prison for writing a fictional story about stoning that she never published.
The authorities stumbled across the manuscript when the police raided her home after arresting her husband.
Golrokh Ebrahimi-Iraee has, in other words, effectively been sentenced for her thoughts, not for anything she did.
She received a phone call last Tuesday from the Judiciary ordering her to Evin prison, where her husband, Arash Sadeghi, a prominent student activist, started serving a 19-year sentence in June.
Ebrahimi-Iraee told the Voice of America Persian network last week that she had been sentenced to five years for insulting Islamic sanctities and one extra year for spreading propaganda against the ruling system.
“They haven’t issued a written summons [as required by the law],” she said in a Skype interview. “They called me using the telephone of one of my friends, Navid Kamran. They had gone to his shop to arrest him and they called me from there to summon me.”
Ebrahimi-Iraee said the authorities had ordered her to go to Evin to serve her sentence by noon the next day.
Amnesty International said Ebrahimi-Iraee’s plight was linked to a fictional story that the authorities discovered in September 2014 when they ransacked the couple’s house in Tehran and confiscated their belongings.
“The charges against Golrokh Ebrahimi-Iraee are ludicrous,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s research director for the Middle East and North Africa.
“She is facing years behind bars simply for writing a story, and one which was not even published–she is effectively being punished for using her imagination.”
Luther said: “She was denied the right to a defense and her sentence was a foregone conclusion. This is just the latest example of the Iranian authorities’ utter contempt for justice and human rights.”
A damning report by the UN’s outgoing secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, released last week, also shed light on Iran’s continuing to hand down stoning sentences. Ban said at least one woman, Fariba Khalegi, who was arrested in November 2013 and has been accused of alleged involvement in the murder of her husband, was facing death by stoning in Iran.
“Khalegi was initially released without charges but was later charged with having a sexual relationship with her husband’s alleged murderer,” the report said. “On 15 October 2014, she was reportedly convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. On 27 January 2015, the supreme court reportedly upheld the sentence.”
Ban’s report said Iranian officials had been adamant that judges in Iran could still sentence convicts to stoning if the punishment was consistent with interpretations of Islamic law.
