Iran’s Supreme Courtroom has now ordered a retrial, Raesian stated, including that the judges determined that Salehi’s earlier jail sentence of six years and three months — on costs of “spreading corruption on the Earth” — violated “Iran’s multiple-offenses guidelines, and was in extra of the authorized punishment.”
Iran’s ISNA information company additionally reported on the Supreme Courtroom’s determination to overturn Salehi’s loss of life sentence. Iran’s mission to the United Nations didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from The Washington Publish early Sunday.
Salehi was taken into custody in October 2022, after he publicly supported the protests sparked by the loss of life of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, which occurred when she was detained for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic costume code for ladies. The weeks-long protest motion, which united completely different factions of Iranian society and introduced a significant problem to Iran’s clerical management, was in the end snuffed out by the nation’s authoritarian system.
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Salehi launched two songs in assist of the protests, together with one which quoted the mantra utilized by protesters: “Lady, life, freedom.” One other, titled “Divination,” contains the road: “Somebody’s crime was her hair dancing within the wind.”
Salehi, a uncommon and unapologetic voice of defiance inside Iran, was an inspiration for the protest motion. He was considered one of a number of high-profile figures arrested in Iran within the crackdown towards the protests over Amini’s loss of life, during which no less than 500 folks have been killed and tens of hundreds detained, based on rights teams.
Salehi was briefly launched from jail in November 2023 however was rearrested lower than two weeks later, after saying in a video that he had been tortured and held in solitary confinement.
When Salehi’s case was appealed to the Supreme Courtroom that point, it known as on the decrease court docket to drop a number of the costs towards him. However a revolutionary court docket, a part of Iran’s parallel justice system, reassumed jurisdiction and sentenced him to loss of life in April — a transfer condemned by human rights teams, specialists with the United Nations and White Home nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan.
A coalition of rights teams working to defend Salehi welcomed the transfer by Iran’s Supreme Courtroom.
“It’s a clear demonstration of the injustice of the decrease court docket determination, and we’re delighted that Salehi not faces the specter of execution. The Supreme Courtroom discovered that the loss of life sentence delivered to Salehi was extreme and did not adjust to Iranian regulation,” stated Index on Censorship, the Human Rights Basis and attorneys representing Salehi in a assertion printed Saturday.
Negin Niknaam, considered one of Salehi’s closest confidants and the one who manages his social media accounts from Germany, stated the loss of life sentence “put big psychological stress” on Salehi, his family and friends. “They wasted a yr of his life in jail. And now took away his loss of life sentence so simply,” she advised The Publish. “It’s not as if we’re all celebrating this.”
“Toomaj’s soul has been broken, our psychological states have been broken — all for a sentence that ought to have by no means been handed down within the first place,” she added.
Because the protests over Amini’s loss of life, authorities have additional tightened their management over Iranian society. Shortly after the primary anniversary of the protests, Iran’s parliament permitted a invoice that may impose extra extreme punishments on these discovered to be violating the costume code for ladies, which features a obligatory hijab, or headband. A constitutional council in Iran returned the invoice to parliament for overview late final yr.
The Supreme Courtroom’s determination comes lower than every week forward of presidential elections in Iran to switch President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash final month. Some activists and supporters of the protest motion have known as for a boycott of the election.
Salehi’s case will now return to the decrease court docket that originally sentenced him to loss of life — Department 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Courtroom — so he can obtain a brand new sentence, based on the Index on Censorship assertion. The group known as on the court docket to respect the rapper’s rights in that course of.
“Even a shorter interval of imprisonment could be an injustice: Salehi has completed nothing apart from to name for his, and different Iranians’, basic rights to be revered,” it stated.
Miriam Berger and Susannah George contributed to this report.
