Iranian artist Parastoo Ahmadi reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for singing without hijab

A 29-year-old Iranian singer has been reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for performing without wearing a hijab, mandated by Iranian morality police. Parastoo Ahmadi and eight members of a production team played a concert livestreamed on Ahmadi’s YouTube channel in 2024. She sang a historic patriotic anthem, ‘Az Khoon-e Javanan-e Vatan’ (‘From the Blood of the Youth of the Homeland’) and the video of the “Caravanserai Concert” has since gone viral.   According to rights activists, the criminal court of Qom province sentenced her and several musicians to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country, and a two-year ban on engaging in artistic activities.  The ruling is yet to be published by the official judiciary news agency. However, the court documents seen by lawyers and rights groups reportedly state that the charges include offending public decency through the production and publication of “vulgar and immoral content” online.Human rights activists say that Ahmadi's sentencing is proof that the situation in Iran has not changed.Bahar Ghandehari, the director of advocacy at the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, said that Ahmadi’s punishment of 74 lashes “is yet another reminder that human rights conditions in Iran have not changed, despite the Iranian authorities’ wartime propaganda campaign aimed at improving their image.” She added that the contrast between official imagery and the prosecution of artists exposed “the gap between the regime’s propaganda and reality”. Reacting to the news, Fatemeh Shams, a professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “If you label this blatant violence with any name other than “crime against humanity”; if, in the midst of such an overt and undeniable battle against women, you speak of “peace” but fail to hear the voices of the victims; if you pit “national interests” against freedom, justice, human dignity, and the right to life; and if you call yourself “anti-war” but remain silent in the face of a war that rages every day against women, girls, and political prisoners, then you have remained neither faithful to the truth nor to justice.” Shams added: “Peace is not merely the silencing of missile sounds or the subsiding of bombardment flames. Peace finds meaning only when the bodies of women and innocent protesters are no longer fields for unrestrained violence; when whips, torture, and nooses are no longer tools of governance.” “True and lasting peace becomes possible only when no woman is branded a criminal for working, studying, singing, or choosing her own lifestyle; and when no innocent human is consigned to dark prison cells and gallows for the crime of protesting, demanding justice, or expressing an opinion.”