An Iranian court has sentenced a young couple aged 21 and 22 to ten and a half years in prison for posting a video of them dancing in Azadi Square — Freedom Square — in central Tehran on social media. She was not wearing a veil.
Section 15 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court found Amir Ahmadi and his partner, Astiaj Haghighi, guilty of the crimes of «encouraging corruption» and «conspiracy against national security and spreading propaganda» against the Islamic Republic, according to the Iranian exile news portal IranWire.
The sentence, dated January 29, also prohibits the defendants from being active on the Internet and from leaving Iran for two years after serving their sentences.
Women are forbidden to dance in the street and the case is even more serious for doing so with a man, even if he is, as in this case, her fiancé.
The two were arrested on November 1 by plainclothes officers who beat them and transferred them to Section 209 of the Intelligence Ministry, according to critical Iranian media. Neither was assisted by a lawyer during the trial, as is their legal right, and their request for bail was rejected. The families of both men were reportedly pressured by the authorities not to talk about the case.
More than 500 people have been killed and 18,000 arrested in the latest wave of protests, which began in September in the wake of the death of Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly wearing the Islamic headscarf incorrectly. Some 20 protesters have been sentenced to death since the start of the protests and four have already been executed.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
