The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh (“rebellion against God”), conspiracy to commit a crime against “national security,” and anti-state propaganda. She was additionally sentenced to receive 74 lashes or pay a fine of $400, an option that makes this punishment especially gratuitous and sadistic.
I wrote about Ahari’s plight in late August for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, citing her first arrest at age seventeen for the ‘crime’ of attending a vigil for the victims of 9/11. Since then she’s been in and out of trouble with the theocratic law for fighting on behalf of political prisoners in Iran. She was incarcerated again in June 2009, exactly a day after Iran’s fraudulent presidential election, and was released three months later following payment of $20,000 in bail. While traveling with two associates to Qom to attend the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man now considered to have been the guiding religious light behind the Green Revolution, Ahari was rounded up yet again.
