TEHRAN: Iran has charged two women journalists with propaganda against the state, the judiciary said on Tuesday, as it presses a crackdown on protests sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini.

The clerical state has been rocked by a protest movement that erupted on September 16 when Amini, 22, died after her arrest for allegedly breaking Iran’s strict hijab dress rules for women.

Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, who have both already spent more than a month in detention, “have been remanded in custody for propaganda against the system and conspiring against national security,” judiciary spokesman Massoud Setayeshi told a weekly briefing in Tehran.

Hamedi, 30, a journalist for the reformist Shargh newspaper, was arrested on September 20, after she visited the hospital where Amini spent three days in her coma before her death.

Mohammadi, 35, a reporter for the Ham Mihan newspaper, was arrested on September 29 after she travelled to Amini’s hometown of Saqez in Kurdistan province to cover her funeral.

The reformist newspaper Sazandegi reported late last month that more than 20 journalists remained in custody for their reporting of Amini’s death or the subsequent unrest. It said several others had been summoned by the authorities.

On October 30, more than 300 journalists issued a joint statement criticising the detention of their colleagues and the denial of their rights, including access to a lawyer. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have arrested prominent lawyer Mostafa Nili, one of more than a dozen rounded up amid a crackdown on protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, his sister said.Security forces, including the Guards, have killed at least 186 people during the crackdown on the women-led protest movement, the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights says.

Top lawyer arrested

Guards intelligence agents detained Nili at Tehran’s Mehrabad international airport on Monday night before raiding his mother’s house and taking him into custody, Fatemeh Nili tweeted.

Another prominent lawyer, Saeid Dehghan, who is believed to be abroad, confirmed his arrest in a post on Twitter.

Nili was one of the “few hopes for citizens against a political system that is the enemy of lawyers” as well as against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who “consider themselves the law”, Dehghan said.

Security forces have waged a campaign of mass arrests that has netted artists, dissidents, journalists and lawyers since protests broke out over Amini’s death on September 16.

At least another 118 people have lost their lives in distinct protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province on Iran’s southeastern border with Pakistan. Dozens of people, most of them demonstrators, have been killed in the protests over Amini’s death. Hundreds more have been arrested.

“People, even among those protesting, are demanding the judiciary deal firmly with the few people who have caused trouble and committed crimes, of course with full respect for Muslim law and legal norms, and the judicial system will act on this basis,” said Setayeshi.

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2022