Iran has sentenced British-Iranian researcher, Kameel Ahmady to 8 years in prison for "collaborating with a hostile government", according to the Iranian news agency. He was given a nine-year sentence for illegally receiving funds from institutions trying to topple the Iranian regime.
Ahmady is an anthropologist who has studied child marriage, female genital mutilation and sexuality in Iran.
Ahmady, was born in north-western Iran and moved to the UK in his 20s, studying at the London School of Economics.
In 2015, he published a study suggesting that tens of thousands of Iranian women had undergone female genital mutilation (fgm)
Until then, Iran had not been widely recognised as a country affected by FGM.
Ahmady had been living in Iran for several years before his arrest in August 2019, according to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, a France-based advocacy group.
According to Ahmady, he spent 100 days without access to a lawyer before he was allowed out on bail.
Mr Ahmady is one of a number of British-Iranian dual nationals being detained in Iran, including the charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and engineer Anoosheh Ashoori.
On Sunday afternoon, December 14, Local time Iran, the Tasnim news agency reported that Mr Ahmady had been sentenced to jail and fined €600,000 ($727,000; £544,000) for accumulating wealth through unlawful means from institutes seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime.
The news agency, which is linked to Iran's hardliners, said he was also accused of seeking "cultural changes" related to women and children, and that he had allegedly been in contact with foreign media and with the embassies of European countries with the aim of "promoting homosexuality" in Iran.
After his conviction, Ahmady wrote on Facebook that the judgement followed a "legal process full of flaws".
"The legal focus of the accusation goes back to my research on the most harmful traditions about children in disadvantaged minority areas of Iran, but the main intention of my accusers has been to link my research to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and to stop my activities with the target community of my research," he added.
A spokesperson for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: "We remain deeply concerned about all our dual British nationals detained in Iran."
No comments:
Post a Comment