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After two trials described by Amnesty International as “grossly unfair,” Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Sotoudeh has dedicated her life to defending Iranian women prosecuted for removing their hijabs in public. She has been in the crosshairs of Iran’s theocratic government for years. Back in 2010, she was convicted of conspiring to harm state security and served half of a six-year sentence. In June 2018, she was rearrested on an array of dubious charges. Tried in secret, details of her ordeal have often come via her husband, Reza Khandan, that wrote of her new, much harsher sentence on Facebook.
Sotoudeh was ultimately charged with seven crimes and given the maximum sentence for all of them. Five additional years were added from a 2016 case in which she was convicted in absentia. The entire 38-year sentence was severe even by Iranian standards — a country often accused of human rights abuses, particularly involving women. Observers say it might signal a newly hardline approach to political dissent.
Critics from across the world decried the outcome of Sotoudeh’s case. Amnesty International said it was the harshest sentence documented against a human rights defender in Iran.
The same day that Sotoudeh was sentenced, the UN investigator on human rights in Iran held up her case as a sign of Iran’s increasingly brutal oppression of those that defend the rights of women.
Reference: Women in the World
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