A court has sentenced an Iranian singer and her team to 74 lashes as well as travel and work bans, prompting an outcry from human rights organisations and Iranians over continued curbs on women’s freedom.
Parastoo Ahmadi, 29, and eight members of a production team were sentenced over a performance livestreamed on YouTube in December 2024, in which Ms Ahmadi performs on stage without a headscarf singing alone.
Iran has mandated head coverings for women in public and banned them from singing solo in public since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which brought the current clerical leadership to power.
Ms Ahmadi and her team were charged with “hurting public decency” by publishing “vulgar and immoral content in cyberspace”, Iranian media reported, and were sentenced by a provincial criminal court in the conservative city of Qom to 74 lashes, a two-year absolute ban on all artistic activities and a two-year travel ban. The presiding judge in the criminal court of Qom, Mohammad Shiri, dismissed the artists’ defences.
The US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Centre, which monitors human rights violations in Iran, described the use of lashing as a “degrading and violent punishment” mostly deployed against political activists and ethnic minorities.
The sentences, which can be appealed, provoked anger among many Iranians who rail against the strict curbing of social freedoms imposed by authorities, especially over women’s rights to choose what they wear and how they live.
Award-winning photographer Tahmineh Monzavi, who has worked for publications including Elle magazine and has had work exhibited in the US, France and Switzerland, was among the concert team members sentenced.
“The result of all that beauty is being banned from art and leaving the country for two years and 74 lashes for all of us,” she said in an Instagram post on Thursday.
The punishments were all “just for publishing a work of art”, the Tehran-based video production house Hafdang said in a separate post.
The concert was performed without an audience in Deyr-e-gachin caravanserai, an ancient trading post converted into a modern events venue, in the desert outside Qom, according to Dadban 2021, a group of lawyers outside Iran. The video has been viewed nearly three million times on YouTube, and songs performed during the concert have individually racked up more than 600,000 plays.
Before the live-stream began, Ms Ahmadi’s YouTube page published a message in which she described herself as a “girl who wants to sing for the people I love”.
“This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately. Here, in this part of our beloved Iran, where history and our myths intertwine, hear my voice in this imaginary concert, and imagine this beautiful homeland,” the message continued.
Among the songs Ms Ahmadi performed was Az Khon-e Javanan-e Vatan (From the Blood of the Country’s Youth), a patriotic anthem composed by Aref Qazvini during Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in the early 20th century.
Ms Ahmadi had previously performed the song during widespread anti-government protests in Iran in 2022 that erupted after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman whom Iran’s morality police had accused of wearing her hijab incorrectly.
Over the past year, an increasing number of Iranian women have been flouting the mandatory headscarf rules, but the sentencing of Ms Ahmadi and her team suggests that the Islamic Republic is not entirely giving up on implementing restrictions on personal freedoms.
Dadban 2021 said the charges of “producing obscene works and offending public modesty” over the production of music and artistic works was “seriously questionable” by criminal law standards, and the ruling issued lacked “legal validity”.
