Farideh Shahgoli, who came to Iran from Germany to visit relatives after 25 years abroad, was sentenced to three years in prison in connection with Facebook activities. Much of the evidence used against her consisted of comments by other people on her page, and were not her own posts.
Name: Farideh Shahgoli
Career: Citizen journalist
Charges: Propaganda against the regime, insulting the supreme leader and supporting the Marxist-Leninist Organization of the Iranian People's Fadaei Guerrillas
Farideh Shahgoli, a former political prisoner in the 1980s, has dual citizenship in Iran and Germany. After 25 years abroad, she traveled to Iran in 2012 to visit relatives but was prohibited from leaving the country when she wanted to go back to Germany.
She was charged with propaganda against the regime and insulting the leader of the Islamic Republic in connection with posts on Facebook. She was arrested, taken to Evin Prison and spent six months in detention, including a total of 50 days in solitary confinement. She was then released on bail pending her trial.
At the trial she was sentenced to three years in prison. She protested the verdict but the Revolutionary Appeals Court upheld it.
On May 21, 2014, Farideh Shahgoli went to the prosecutor’s office at Evin prison to follow up on her case but was arrested and sentenced to three years in jail. From her prison cell she appealed to President Hassan Rouhani in a letter saying, “I am a housewife and a mother to two children. I was sentenced to three years in prison for my activities on Facebook and for what the honorable judge of the Revolutionary Court interpreted as propaganda against the regime and insults against the exalted Supreme Leader.
“It has been more than two years since I last saw my spouse and my two children who live outside the country. I was sentenced because the examining magistrate and the interrogator, who are not well-versed in cyberspace and Facebook, used everything that other users had posted to my page as evidence against me. When I was in solitary confinement they threatened repeatedly to hang me and forced me to sign and put my fingerprints on papers that said I—a housewife—had confessed to writing those things and to drawing insulting cartoons.”
Farideh Shahgoli is currently serving a three-year sentence at Evin Prison.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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