Iranian cartoonist sentenced to six years in prison

On June 10, Iranian artist and political dissident Atena Farghadani was sentenced to six years in prison, according to her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi, who denounced the “sham” trial of X. Farghadani received five years in prison for “insulting to the sacred” and a prison sentence. additional year for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic”.

She was convicted by the 26th branch of Tehran's revolutionary court, which was tasked with trying people suspected of crimes including blasphemy, insulting the Supreme Leader and attempting to overthrow the Islamic government. Moghimi said the court applied the maximum sentence by considering the charges as separate crimes, despite the fact that both convictions came from the same incident.

Farghadani's “crimes” included hanging one of her caricatures of political figures on a wall on Rue Pasteur, near the presidential palace in Tehran, where she was violently arrested by intelligence agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on April 12. The artist suffered visible injuries to his face. To protest the violent attack, she refused to post bail and was sent to Qarchak Prison, which refused to accept her due to her injuries. She was then transferred to the notorious Evin Prison, where she had been held during her previous periods of detention.

Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said Farghadani “was targeted for her courageous courage against the Islamic Republic's repression” and called on international artistic communities to demand her release immediate.

Camilla Alvarez-Chow is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.

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