Jîna Mahsa Amini’s family lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, has been convicted of ‘propaganda against the state’ in Iran and sentenced to one year in prison, the Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) reported.
Evidence for engaging in “anti-regime propaganda”, the network said, was based on the lawyer’s request for independent doctors to attend a revised forensic commission on the cause of Amini’s death, in order to “explain to them the developments and reasons behind the incident”.
Relatives of the Kurdish-Iranian women’s rights protest icon, who died in police custody in September last year, were not medical experts, the lawyer explained, and it was “in accordance with legal duty” to object to the initial forensic report and request further support from health professionals.
“Eyewitnesses among the detainees in the same van that took Amini to a detention centre confirmed that police officers used violence and beat the young woman severely, fracturing her skull. Amini was brain-dead when she was hospitalised. She died three days later”, the rights watchdog said.
Amini’s death at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s notorious ‘morality police’ sparked some of the most widespread and revolutionary anti-government uprisings the country has ever seen. The authorities clamped down on the demonstrations with brutal force, enforced ever stricter Islamic dresscode for women and tightened legislation over freedoms of expression.
The Amini family lawyer has been banned from social media for two years as part of his sentence.
The investigation into the cause of Amini’s death has not been subjected to judicial action, and was conducted without the involvement of her family and lawyer, the KHRN reported Nikbakht as saying.
