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Iran’s renowned rights lawyer Sotoudeh arrested: husband
TEHRAN, June 13, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Iran’s award-winning human rights lawyer
Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested on Wednesday, her husband said in a Facebook
post.
“A few hours ago Nasrin was arrested at home and transferred to Evin,”
Tehran’s notorious prison where many political prisoners are held, her
husband Reza Khandan wrote.
Sotoudeh, 55, one of the few outspoken advocates for human rights in Iran,
recently represented several women arrested for protesting against the
mandatory wearing of headscarves.
Tehran police said in February that 29 women had been detained for posing
in public without their headscarves in the previous weeks.
Khandan’s Facebook message was defiant, saying: “I once told interrogators
in the interrogating room: ‘Of all the things the authorities should do for
their country, you only know one and that is arresting people.'”
Sotoudeh won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov rights award in
2012 for her work on high-profile rights and political cases, including
juveniles facing the death penalty in the Islamic republic.
She spent three years in prison between 2010 and 2013 for “actions against
national security” and spreading “propaganda against the regime” and remains
banned from representing political cases or leaving Iran until 2022.
Sotoudeh has defended journalists and activists including Nobel Peace
laureate Shirin Ebadi and several dissidents arrested during mass protests in
2009.
During her time in jail, she staged two hunger strikes in protest at the
conditions in Evin and over a ban on seeing her son and daughter.
Sotoudeh was released in September 2013 shortly before Iran’s then newly
elected President Hassan Rouhani, who had campaigned on a pledge to improve
civil rights, attended the UN General Assembly.
BSS/AFP/MRI/1638 hrs