Toomaj Salehi’s demise sentence overturned by Iran’s Supreme Court docket

Iran’s Supreme Court docket has now ordered a retrial, Raesian stated, including that the judges determined that Salehi’s earlier jail sentence of six years and three months — on costs of “spreading corruption on the Earth” — violated “Iran’s multiple-offenses guidelines, and was in extra of the authorized punishment.”

Iran’s ISNA information company additionally reported on the Supreme Court docket’s resolution to overturn Salehi’s demise sentence. Iran’s mission to the United Nations didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from The Washington Submit early Sunday.

Salehi was taken into custody in October 2022, after he publicly supported the protests sparked by the demise of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, which happened when she was detained for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic costume code for girls. The weeks-long protest motion, which united totally different factions of Iranian society and offered a significant problem to Iran’s clerical management, was finally snuffed out by the nation’s authoritarian system.

Salehi launched two songs in help of the protests, together with one which quoted the mantra utilized by protesters: “Girl, life, freedom.” One other, titled “Divination,” consists of the road: “Somebody’s crime was her hair dancing within the wind.”

Salehi, a uncommon and unapologetic voice of defiance inside Iran, was an inspiration for the protest motion. He was one in all a number of high-profile figures arrested in Iran within the crackdown in opposition to the protests over Amini’s demise, through which at the least 500 individuals have been killed and tens of 1000’s detained, based on rights teams.

Salehi was briefly launched from jail in November 2023 however was rearrested lower than two weeks later, after saying in a video that he had been tortured and held in solitary confinement.

When Salehi’s case was appealed to the Supreme Court docket that point, it known as on the decrease courtroom to drop a few of the costs in opposition to him. However a revolutionary courtroom, a part of Iran’s parallel justice system, reassumed jurisdiction and sentenced him to demise in April — a transfer condemned by human rights teams, specialists with the United Nations and White Home nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan.

A coalition of rights teams working to defend Salehi welcomed the transfer by Iran’s Supreme Court docket.

“It’s a clear demonstration of the injustice of the decrease courtroom resolution, and we’re delighted that Salehi now not faces the specter of execution. The Supreme Court docket discovered that the demise sentence delivered to Salehi was extreme and didn’t adjust to Iranian regulation,” stated Index on Censorship, the Human Rights Basis and attorneys representing Salehi in a assertion revealed Saturday.

Negin Niknaam, one in all Salehi’s closest confidants and the one who manages his social media accounts from Germany, stated the demise sentence “put enormous psychological stress” on Salehi, his family and friends. “They wasted a yr of his life in jail. And now took away his demise sentence so simply,” she advised The Submit. “It’s not as if we’re all celebrating this.”

“Toomaj’s soul has been broken, our psychological states have been broken — all for a sentence that ought to have by no means been handed down within the first place,” she added.

Because the protests over Amini’s demise, authorities have additional tightened their management over Iranian society. Shortly after the primary anniversary of the protests, Iran’s parliament authorised a invoice that will impose extra extreme punishments on these discovered to be violating the costume code for girls, which features a obligatory hijab, or headband. A constitutional council in Iran returned the invoice to parliament for assessment late final yr.

The Supreme Court docket’s resolution comes lower than every week forward of presidential elections in Iran to switch President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash final month. Some activists and supporters of the protest motion have known as for a boycott of the election.

Salehi’s case will now return to the decrease courtroom that originally sentenced him to demise — Department 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court docket — so he can obtain a brand new sentence, based on the Index on Censorship assertion. The group known as on the courtroom to respect the rapper’s rights in that course of.

“Even a shorter interval of imprisonment could be an injustice: Salehi has accomplished nothing aside from to name for his, and different Iranians’, basic rights to be revered,” it stated.

Miriam Berger and Susannah George contributed to this report.