Breathing in Confinement – Iran\u2019s judiciary should vacate the death sentence of a 30-year-old man who faces imminent execution for Facebook posts linked to his account. On November 24, 2014, Iran\u2019s Supreme Court upheld a criminal court ruling sentencing Soheil Arabi to hang. The court transferred his file to the judiciary\u2019s implementation unit, opening the way for his execution.<\/p>\n
A Tehran criminal court had convicted him in August of\u00a0sabb al-nabbi<\/em>, or \u201cinsulting the prophet,\u201d referring to the Prophet Muhammad, which carries the death penalty. Arabi\u2019s legal team has asked the judiciary to suspend the death sentence and review the case.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is simply shocking that anyone should face the gallows simply because of Internet postings that are deemed to be crude, offensive, or insulting,\u201d said Eric Goldstein, deputy Middle East and North Africa\u00a0director. \u201cIran should urgently revise its penal code to eliminate provisions that criminalize peaceful free expression, especially when they punish its exercise with death.\u201d<\/p>\n Nastaran Naimi, Arabi\u2019s wife, told Human Rights Watch that intelligence agents linked with Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards arrested her and her husband at their home in Tehran in November 2013. They soon released her but transferred her husband to a special section of Evin prison that the Revolutionary Guards control, where they kept him in solitary confinement for two months, subjected him to long interrogation sessions, and prevented him from meeting his lawyer, she said. They later transferred Arabi to Ward 350 of Evin prison.<\/p>\n Vahid Moshkhani, Arabi\u2019s lawyer, told Human Rights Watch that instead of upholding or overruling the lower court verdict, the Supreme Court unlawfully added the charge of efsad-e fel arz<\/em>, or \u201csowing corruption of earth,\u201d to Arabi\u2019s case. In addition to carrying a possible death sentence, the charge also forecloses the possibility of amnesty, he said.<\/p>\n Moshkani said the Supreme Court rejected his client\u2019s defense that he had not written many of the Facebook posts and that he was merely sharing others\u2019 views on the social media site. Article 263 of the revised Islamic Penal Code provides that a person who \u201cinsults the Prophet\u201d while drunk or by quoting others, among other acts, will be subjected to 74 lashes and not sentenced to death.<\/p>\n The lower court verdict, which Human Rights Watch has reviewed, relied on Arabi\u2019s confessions and \u201cavailable images and printouts\u201d attributed to his Facebook page, and concluded that his actions \u201cconstitute clear proof\u201d that he insulted the Prophet Muhammad and should be sentenced to death. On September 4, 2013, judiciary officials sentenced Arabi to three years in prison for \u201cpropaganda against the state\u201d and \u201cinsulting the Supreme Leader\u201d in a separate case stemming from the same Facebook posts.<\/p>\n Naimi said that her husband\u2019s interrogators subjected him to psychological pressure and threatened to prosecute and convict him if he did not take responsibility for posting offensive material on his Facebook page. She said the first time Arabi was able to meet with his lawyer was just before his trial, though judiciary officials allowed his lawyer to review the case file prior to mounting a defense. She said she has yet to tell their 5-year-old daughter that her father is in prison and at imminent risk of execution, but rather, \u201cWe\u2019ve told her that he\u2019s gone away for work.\u201d<\/p>\n On November 28, 2014, an Iranian news site published a story alleging that Arabi had been given a death sentence not for having \u201cinsulted the prophet,\u201d but because he had raped several women. The news site said it had evidence to back up this claim but did not produce any information. In response, Saham News, a site critical of the Iranian government, published pictures of the lower court verdict to counter any claim that the judiciary had prosecuted Arabi for rape or illicit sexual relations, and one of his lawyers denied that his client had ever been prosecuted for such a crime. The judiciary has not commented on allegations that Arabi has been charged or convicted for sexual assault.<\/p>\n The circumstances surrounding the recent execution of another man, Mohsen Amir Aslani, have increased concerns for Arabi. On September 24, prison officials at Rajai Shahr prison in the city of Karaj executed Amir Aslani, whom the judiciary had convicted of \u201csowing corruption on earth\u201d for allegedly advancing heretical interpretations of Islam and insulting the prophet Jonah. After the execution, a judiciary spokesman, Gholamhossein Esmaeili, denied that authorities had executed Amir Aslani for his religious beliefs, and said his hanging was related to \u201cillicit\u201d forcible sexual relations with several women. In fact, the Supreme Court hadoverturned Amir Aslani\u2019s death sentence on three separate occasions, and ruled that the rape charges were invalid due to lack of evidence.<\/p>\n Human Rights Watch previously expressed concern regarding the broad definition of \u201csowing corruption on earth\u201d in the revised penal code, under which authorities can prosecute, convict, and sentence political dissidents and others exercising their basic rights to freedom of speech, assembly, association, and religion. Human Rights Watch is opposed to the death penalty in all cases, due to its inherently cruel and irreversible nature.<\/p>\n Iran is one of the world\u2019s most prolific jailers of writers, according to Reporters Without Borders. As of July, at least 65 journalists, bloggers, and social media activists were in prison on various charges related to their speech or writings. Since President Hassan Rouhani\u2019s inauguration in August 2013, security and intelligence agents, including the Revolutionary Guards, have apparently stepped up a crackdown on dissent through the Internet, and Iran\u2019s judiciary has meted out particularly harsh punishments for bloggers and social media users.<\/p>\n In May 2014, police arrested four young men and three women after a video showing them dancing to the popular song \u201cHappy\u201d went viral on YouTube. Authorities released them to face trial on charges that included engaging in \u201cillicit relations.\u201d In the same month, a Tehran revolutionary court sentenced eight Facebook users to prison terms ranging from eight to 21 years for allegedly posting messages to insult government officials and \u201creligious sanctities,\u201d among other crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Breathing in Confinement – Iran’s judiciary should vacate the death sentence of a 30-year-old man who faces imminent execution for Facebook posts linked to his account. On November 24, 2014, Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a criminal court ruling sentencing Soheil Arabi to hang. The court transferred his file to the judiciary’s implementation unit, opening the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[90,177],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prisoner","tag-human-rights-watch","tag-soheil-arabi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3yHPi-69","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bciran.org\/wplocationen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}