On Wednesday, Tehran’s judiciary announced that an Iranian woman protesting in December against the mandatory hijab for women was sentenced to two years in prison.
As Lisa Daftari writes at The Foreign Desk, the judiciary stated that the woman was guilty of “encouraging corruption” for removing her headscarf.
According to judicial sources in Iran, the woman plans to appeal the verdict; if the appeal fails, she will be eligible for parole after serving three months in jail. Tehran’s chief prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said the sentence should have been more severe, adding that he would seek the full two-year sentence to be carried out.
As Daftari notes:
Over 35 women have been detained in just capital-city Tehran since December 2017 for breaching compulsory veiling laws, with at least two women facing trial under the new draconian law, according to leading rights group Amnesty International. Many of the female protestors braved near-certain arrest by removing their headscarves in public while standing on utility boxes and other public platforms and sharing photos and videos of themselves on social media.
On December 27, Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother, was arrested by Iranian authorities after a video of her with her hair uncovered and waving a white hijab went viral; there were protests around the world which precipitated Iranian authorities to release her in late January.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, women in Iran have been forced to cover their hair, or face fines, lashings and imprisonment. But women were not as repressed then; on March 8, 1979, over 100,000 women gathered on the streets of Tehran to protest the new law.