Elham Chobdar was also charged and convicted as part of the same case and sentenced to death, Iranian state media reported.
The two were accused of “trafficking young women” in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province and other unnamed parts of the country, according to the IRNA report.
Amnesty said on Tuesday it was “outraged” by the sentences and called on Iranian authorities to “immediately overturn the convictions and death sentences” and release Sedighi-Hamadani and Chobdar, the statement said. The sentences are subject to appeal to Iran’s Supreme Court, he added.
Amnesty said in January that Sedighi-Hamadani, who also goes by the name Sareh, was first arrested in October 2021 in Erbil, Iraq, in connection with an appearance in a BBC documentary about abuse of the LGBTQ community. in the region.
After her release in Iraq, Sedighi-Hamadani tried to cross into Turkey from Iran to seek asylum, Amnesty said, but in November, the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Organization said a “leader” of a human trafficking network ” was involved in smuggling Iranian girls and women” to neighboring countries and directing them to homosexual groups under “protection [foreign] intelligence services’ had been arrested.
Amnesty believes the statement by the Revolutionary Guards was referring to Sedigi-Hamadani and called the claims “false and baseless”.
Before she allegedly attempted to cross into Turkey, Sedighi-Hamadani said she was “traveling to freedom” in a video released by the Iranian Lesbian and Transgender Network, also known as 6Rang, in December 2021 and reported by Amnesty in next month. .
“If I succeed, I will continue to look out for LGBT people. I will stand behind them and raise my voice. If I don’t succeed, I will have given my life for this cause,” he said in the video. . ,
In a letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Court, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, Amnesty said Sedighi-Hamadani was charged in January by the prosecutor in Urumieh with “spreading corruption in the land”, including “promoting homosexuality ». contacting anti-Islamic Republic media channels’, and ‘promoting Christianity’.
Iranian state media reported that Sedighi-Hamadani’s and Chobdar’s sentences were related to human trafficking, without mentioning Sedighi-Hamadani’s charges or her activism or further details about Chobdar.
“Contrary to reports published on social media, the area of charges against these individuals is related to the trafficking of women and young girls with the hope of education and the promise of employment in a regional country and they were also abused and this led to the suicide of some of these girls,” IRNA reported, without elaborating.
CNN contacted the Iranian government about the claim that Sedighi-Hamadani’s sexual minority was the reason for her conviction. It was not immediately clear whether Sedighi-Hamadani and Chobdar had lawyers.
