Iranian Artist Atena Farghadani Sentenced to Six Years in Prison

Iranian artist and activist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced by the 26th Branch of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran to six years in prison for attempting to hang one of her political cartoons near the presidential palace in Tehran. Farghadani received five years for “insulting the sacred” and one for “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Her lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi, said that the court handed her the maximum penalty by treating the charges as separate crimes, despite the fact that both stemmed from the same incident.

Farghadani was arrested April 13 by intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to an account the artist supplied to her husband when he visited her in prison the following week, she was taken to an undisclosed location and beaten unconscious. Farghadani refused trial in protest of her treatment and on the grounds that she had not committed a crime and did not consider the Revolutionary Court a legal entity. She additionally refused the counsel of judiciary-approved lawyers. She has since been held in Evin prison, known as “the University” owing to the number of students and intellectuals incarcerated there.

Numerous human rights groups and those that seek to preserve journalistic freedom have condemned Farghadani’s sentencing, among them Artists at Risk Connection, Cartooning for Peace, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Index on Censorship, and the Professional Cartoonists’ Organization. These and other organizations added their signatures to a statement calling for her immediate release.

Farghadani has previously been arrested for her artwork, beginning in 2014, when she was detained for a cartoon mocking a family planning law. Last summer, she was arrested after posting a political cartoon to her Instagram account; the artist was subsequently tortured in prison before being released to a hospital after embarking on a hunger strike. The groups calling for her release noted that “the maximum penalties are indicative of the Iranian regime’s long-standing determination to persecute and silence this courageous rights defender.”