Sajedeh Arabsorkhi, who had been living in Frace, was visiting with family in Tehran when she was told she faced two charges of propaganda against the regime. She is currently held in Evin Prison serving her first one-year sentence.
Name: Sajedeh Arabsorkhi
Career: Journalist
Charges: Propaganda against the regime and conspiracy.
Sajedeh Arabsorkhi is the daughter of Feyzollah Arabsorkhi, the former deputy trade minister under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami and a leader of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization (MIRO). He spent four years in prison following the aftermath of the contested 2009 presidential election.
In September 2013, after Hassan Rouhani was elected president, Sajedeh Arabsorkhi travelled from France, where she had been living and studying, to Iran to visit her family and in particular her father, who was on medical leave from prison. Unaware that she would be accused of activities against the Islamic Republic by two separate agencies, she brought her eight-year old daughter to Iran with her.
In the first case against her, she was tried in absentia at Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court by Judge Moghisei and was sentenced to one year in prison. She was accused of propaganda against the regime; email exchanges between Arabsorkhi and her father were produced as evidence against her. She is currently serving a sentence at Evin Prison.
The Intelligence Division of the Revolutionary Guards opened the second case against her, also accusing her of propaganda against the regime. She was summoned to the Revolutionary Court and, on November 24, 2013, she stood trial. Her mother was told before the trial that her daughter would be released following interrogations if the family settled a bail $56,000. However, following her interrogation, the judge doubled the original bail amount and she was detained overnight.
On July 8, 2014 Sajedeh Arabsorkhi began a one-year sentence at Evin Prison. Numerous human rights organizations and figures, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and US philosopher Noam Chomsky, have demanded her release.
On August 30, 2014, Arabsorkhi wrote an open letter from prison, stating that the reason she’d been arrested was to scare Iranian expatriates from returning to Iran. “Every day a judicial or security authority discusses convictions in absentia to keep our youth — our investments for a better Iran — in foreign countries and allow the corrupt and the power-hungry to have the country to themselves,” she wrote. “But I, prisoner number 242211 of the women’s ward at Evin Prison, say loudly that if I was given the chance to go back one year ago and decide whether or not to come to Tehran, I would hold my head high and do the same again, even if the Guards’ interrogator welcomed me at the airport and took me straight to prison.”
For more information, visit Journalism is Not a Crime, documenting cases of jailed journalists in Iran.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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