The European Union on Thursday called on Iran to review a case of a prominent female human rights activist who was sentenced to 30 months in prison and 80 lashes on charges of protesting against the killing of protesters during the country's 2019 unrest.
A spokesperson for the bloc urged Iran to look into the case of Narges Mohammadi under “applicable international human rights law and taking into account her deteriorating health condition.”
Earlier this week, Mohammadi confirmed her sentence in an Instagram post and said she does not “accept any of these sentences.”
“The recent sentencing of the Iranian human rights defender Mrs Narges Mohammadi to prison term and flogging is a worrying development,” the EU said, according to The Associated Press.
In the post, Mohammadi said one of the charges against her is having a party and dancing in jail.
She was released from jail in October 2020, after serving eight and a half years in prison, after her initial, 10-year sentence was commuted. In that case, she was sentenced in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges including planning crimes to harm the security of Iran, spreading propaganda against the government and forming and managing an illegal group.
Before imprisonment she also was vice-president of the banned Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran.
Mohammadi has been close to Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who founded the center. Ebadi left Iran after the disputed re-election of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, which touched off unprecedented protests and harsh crackdowns by authorities.
In 2018, Mohammadi, an engineer and physic, was awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize.
