Iran activist to face 10 more years in prison
tehran — Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been sentenced to an extra 10 years in jail on top of the fiveyear term she is already serving, her husband said on Tuesday.
Sotoudeh is an award-winning rights activist who was arrested last June and told she had been found guilty in absentia of espionage charges and sentenced to five years.
The new 10-year sentence was the longest of seven different verdicts totalling 33 years bundled together in a case and communicated to Sotoudeh in prison, according to her husband Reza Khandan.
“But only the longest sentence will be served, which is ‘encouraging corruption and debauchery and providing the means’,” he told AFP by telephone.
He said Sotoudeh had also been sentenced to a total of 148 lashes for appearing in court without the hijab and for another offence.
She had been found guilty of “colluding against the system, propaganda against the system... disrupting public order” and several other counts.
On Monday, a judge said she had been sentenced in her latest conviction to five years for colluding against the system and two years for insulting Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
But Khandan said that to the best of his knowledge his wife had not been charged with insulting the leader.
The UN top expert on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, said the reported conviction was “a crystal-clear illustration of an increasingly severe state response”. “There is an increasing concern that the civil space for human rights lawyers and defenders is being reduced,” he said in Geneva. —