Nasrin Sotoudeh, an internationally renowned human rights lawyer jailed in Iran, was handed a new sentence on Monday that her husband said was 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Sotoudeh, who has represented opposition activists including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory head scarf, was arrested in June and charged with spying, spreading propaganda and insulting Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, her lawyer said.
She was jailed in 2010 for spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security — charges she denied — and was released after serving half her six-year term. The European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov Prize.
Photo: AFP
A judge at a revolutionary court in Tehran, Mohammad Moqiseh, on Monday said that Sotoudeh had been sentenced to five years for assembling against national security and two years for insulting Khamenei, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, wrote on Facebook that the sentence was decades in jail and 148 lashes, unusually harsh even for Iran, which cracks down hard on dissent and regularly imposes death sentences for some crimes.
The UN investigator on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, on Monday raised Sotoudeh’s case at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, saying that last week she “was reportedly convicted of charges relating to her work and could face a lengthy prison sentence.”
“Worrying patterns of intimidation, arrest, prosecution and ill-treatment of human rights defenders, lawyers and labor rights activists signal an increasingly severe state response,” Rehman said.
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