Iranian authorities jailed a prominent lawyer who “represented women unjustly detained for protesting Iran’s mandatory hijab law,” drawing a Thursday rebuke from the top State Department spokeswoman.
“We are deeply concerned by reports that Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been arrested again,” Heather Nauert, acting undersecretary of state for public affairs, said Thursday afternoon. “We call on Iranian authorities to release her immediately, along with the hundreds of others who are currently imprisoned simply for expressing their views and desires for a better life.”
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Women protesting the requirement to wear a full-body hijab have frustrated Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the last several months. The regime’s supreme leader has said that political elites who support the protests are on “the path of the enemy.”
Sotoudeh, who was honored in 2012 by the European Union for her human rights activism, was arrested on Wednesday. “They said they have an arrest warrant for a five-year prison sentence issued for her apparently by a revolutionary court,” Reza Khandan, her husband, told U.S.-backed Radio Farda. “But they didn’t have the verdict for them.”
Sotoudeh was reportedly taken to Evin Prison, a facility highlighted by the Treasury Department for an array of human rights abuses during a sanctions announcement last month.
“Prisoners held at Evin Prison are subject to brutal tactics inflicted by prison authorities, including sexual assaults, physical assaults, and electric shock,” the Treasury Department bulletin said. “And while senior regime officials regularly downplay the torture and abuse that occurs in Evin Prison, the abuse of prisoners, including political prisoners, continues once sham inspections into the prison conditions end.”
The persistence of protests against the hijabs has contributed to a hope, among some Iran hawks at least, that a renewal of sanctions on the regime might force the government to choose between collapse and compliance with President Trump’s demands that they dismantle their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
“The regime has been fighting all over the Middle East for many years,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month. “After our sanctions come in force, it will be battling to keep its economy alive. Iran will be forced to make a choice: either fight to keep its economy off life support at home or keep squandering precious wealth on fights abroad. It will not have the resources to do both.”
