Iran Sentences Hijab Protester to 2 Years in Prison for ‘Encouraging Corruption’

A woman arrested in December for removing her hijab in public and waving it to protest the compulsory law on wearing it since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was sentenced on Thursday to up to two years in prison for “encouraging corruption.”

Her sentence was handed down on International Women’s Day.

She will reportedly appeal her verdict and be eligible for parole after serving three months of her two-year sentence.

However, the Guardian noted that Tehran’s chief prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said the woman’s sentence was “light” and not harsh enough. He promised to impose the full two-year sentence.

More than 30 women have reportedly been arrested for removing their hijabs in public since December.

The Guardian writes, “Women showing their hair in public in Iran are usually sentenced to far shorter terms of two months or less, and fined $25.”

One woman, 31-year-old Vida Movahed, a mother of a young child, who became an international icon for the December 28 uprising, was arrested the day before the protests began after a video surfaced of her waving a white hijab on Enghelab (Revolution) Street in Tehran.

She was released in late January after an outcry from the international community.

In addition to the crackdown on women in recent months, the Iranian regime has arrested thousands of protesters, and dozens have died in the streets or in prisons.

The regime labeled the prison-related deaths “suicides,” but physical evidence, including marks of torture on the bodies of the deceased, indicated otherwise.

Breitbart News reported in January that Saro Ghahremani, a 24-year-old Kurdish protester, died in Sanandaj prison in Iranian Kurdistan, and Ali Poladi, approximately 26 years old, died in the northern Iranian Chalus prison.

While Iranian officials claim, as they have in many similar cases, that the men committed suicide, Ghahremani’s parents, who accompanied their son’s lifeless body in the ambulance on their way to the cemetery where his body was immediately buried, noticed injuries on his body they believed were telltale signs that he was beaten and tortured to death.

Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.