Sara Moghaddam
The verdict of women’s rights activist Zeinab Peighambarzadeh was upheld by branch 21 of the appellate court. The verdict involves a one year prison sentence – suspended for three years – and the requirement to report to the ministry of intelligence once every four months. A member of the One Million Signatures Campaign, Zeinab Peighambarzadeh confirmed the news in an interview with Rooz: “This verdict was issued due to my presence and the presence of several women’s rights activists on March 3 of 2006 in front of the Revolutionary Court.”
Commenting on her suspended prison sentence, Peighambarzadeh said, “This suspended sentence is issued because, on the one hand, the Islamic Republic does not want to pay the price for imprisoning civil society activists, especially women, whose actions are peaceful, while on the other hand, it wants to control their activism and apply pressure. However, the experience of these years has shown that this trick is not successful in suppressing civil society activism.”
Also, commenting on the portion of the verdict requiring her to report to the intelligence ministry once every four months, Peighambarzadeh said, “In the past few years and, more specifically, after the implementation of the plan to boost public security, this method was introduced to punish individuals that were labeled as thugs and gangsters. Evidently, similar verdicts were issued in the 1980s for some political prisoners. It is completely obvious that such abnormal verdicts are issued for women’s rights activists to increase pressure on them and used as an excuse to continuously interrogate them. All our activities are public and transparent, and we do not engage in any secret activity that we would reveal under such interrogation.”
On March 3, 2006, several women’s rights activists gathered in front of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran in solidarity with five prominent women’s rights activists whose trials were held on that day. Thirty-three people, among them Zeinab Peighambarzadeh, were arrested at that gathering and spent several days at the Evin prison.
