Iranian poet and civil rights activist Atefeh Chaharmahalian says Iran's judiciary has ordered her previously suspended prison sentence to be executed, meaning she now faces spending the rest of her two-year, eight-month penalty behind bars.
Chaharmahalian, once a member of the Iranian Writers' Association's Board of Secretaries, was initially detained in October 2022 during the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests in Tehran and held in the notorious Evin prison's Ward 209.
Chaharmahalian announced via Instagram that her lawyer, Saeedeh Hosseinzadeh, has been informed of the decision to enforce the full term of her imprisonment, which she attributes to her refusal to accept an amnesty from Iran’s leader and her commitment to writing and defending people's rights.
"I neither accepted an amnesty -- I'd never consider writing and defending people's rights as a crime that requires an amnesty -- nor put down the pen," she wrote.
In February 2023, state media reported that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued an amnesty for "tens of thousands" of prisoners, including protesters arrested during the anti-government rallies sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody after allegedly breaking the law on the mandatory Islamic head scarf, or hijab.
Many lawyers, human rights activists, imprisoned protesters, and former political prisoners have dismissed the amnesty decree as an empty gesture aimed at quelling a wave of dissent that has rocked the country for more than a year.
Since the widely publicized issuance of the decree, which resulted in the release of several political and civil prisoners, a number have been rearrested and are now facing fresh charges.
PEN America’s 2022 Freedom To Write Index put Iran second only to China in the number of the detained writers and artists at 57. The result was worse than the previous year, when Iran ranked fourth globally.
In a related incident, the activist HRANA news agency reported that film editor Fatima Zahraei has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence by Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Court.
Zahraei was arrested on October 29 during the funeral of 17-year-old Armita Garavand, who had succumbed a day earlier to injuries suffered in an alleged confrontation with Iran's morality police in the Tehran subway over a head-scarf violation.
The death of Amini in September 2022 while in police custody for an alleged hijab violation released a wave of anger that has presented the Islamic regime with its biggest challenge since the revolution.
Garavand's case, and suggestions of a cover-up by the authorities over what transpired in the teen's last living moments, have drawn parallels with the events leading up to the death of Amini, which was also shrouded in mystery.