Monireh Arabshahi, mother of imprisoned activist Yasaman Aryani, was arrested in 2019 after they shared video on social media showing the two of them unveiled while distributing white flowers to riders in a women-only carriage of the Tehran metro on International Women’s Day. Mother and daughter were convicted of “spreading propaganda,” “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security’, and ‘inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution.” They were both sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment. On 3 August 2019, Arabshahi said in an open letter from prison: “I am actually happy that in the fifth decade of my life I have been able to pull aside the veil that for many years covered my thoughts, ideas and beliefs. And today … I feel like a free bird.”
Arabshahi suffers from thyroid disease, but has been prevented from obtaining adequate treatment for her very serious condition. Both Aryani and Arabshahi continue to suffer extraordinary judicial and arbitrary harassments while imprisoned.
Yasaman Aryani, women's rights activist, was arrested in 2018 at a street demonstration in Tehran while helping an older woman who had been knocked down by police. She was sentenced to a year in prison. On her early release she called out the hypocrisy of the regime. She was arrested again in 2019 after posting a video of herself and her mother on a women-only commuter train without headscarves, speaking to the passengers about hope for women. She was charged with "inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution" through promoting "unveiling" and is serving a 16-year prison sentence. Prison conditions in Iran are by design both unspeakably vile and monstrously violent.
The December 2022 announcement that the Morality Police have been called off is a cynical smokescreen. We must keep up international pressure against this horrific regime.
Raheleh Ahmadi is the mother of Saba Kord Afshari, who in 2019 was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “promoting corruption and prostitution through appearing without a headscarf in public.” Ahmadi was arrested on July 10, 2019 after protesting the arrest and treatment of her daughter. Ahmadi’s imprisonment on similar charges was intended as harassment of Afshari. It is reported that Ahmadi was told that she will only be released when her daughter “confesses” on video; and that Ahmadi was placed in solitary confinement as a means of pressuring her to comply. There have been multiple reports of threats against family members of protestors who have been detained and killed in order to elicit false confessions or coerced confirmations of regime lies about their loved ones’ fates.
Both Afshari and Ahmadi were in Evin Prison together until separated when Afshari was transferred in 2020 to Qarchak Prison. Ahmadi is in poor health and in February 2022 was granted medical leave to recover from COVID-19 contracted in prison.
