Iranian Cartoonist Sentenced to Six Years in Prison
By Camilla Alvarez-Chow
Portrait of ATENA FARGHADANI.
On June 10, the 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 on X. Farghadani received five years imprisonment for “insulting the sacred” and an additional year for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”
She was sentenced by the 26th Branch of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, which was designed to try those suspected of crimes including blaspheming, insulting the Supreme Leader, and attempting to overthrow the Islamic government. Moghimi stated that the court enforced the maximum penalty by considering the charges as separate crimes, despite the fact that both convictions came from the same incident.
Farghadani’s “crimes” involved hanging one of her caricatures of political figures on a wall in Pasteur Street near the presidential palace in Tehran, where she was violently arrested by intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on April 12. According to her lawyer, the artist sustained visible facial injuries. In protest against the violent assault, she refused to post bail and was sent to Qarchak prison, which refused to accept her due to her wounds. She was then transferred to the notorious Evin Prison, where she was previously held in during her past periods of detention.
Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said that Farghadani “has been targeted for her courageous defiance against the Islamic Republic’s repression” and called for the international artistic communities to demand her immediate release.
Camilla Alvarez-Chow is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.
