August 12, 2015The Guardian
"Human rights campaigner held in Tehran’s Evin prison despite the fact she should have been freed in June, while her husband is threatened for speaking out."
"Seven years ago this summer, everything was set for the marriage ceremony of a young Iranian couple who had met and fallen in love at university. But on the day before the wedding, plain clothes officers raided the house of Bahareh Hedayat, a leading student activist, and took her to prison.
It wasn’t a surprise; she had been arrested twice before that, but the timing could not have been a coincidence. When she was released a month later, she didn’t feel in mood for a big ceremony, as is customary in Iran. The couple simply moved in together.
That incident didn’t shake her commitment to fight for human rights. In fact, since then, Hedayat and her husband, Amin Ahmadian, have spent only a year together. She has been in jail the rest of the time.
Now, the authorities are refusing to release Hedayat even though she is eligible to be released under Iranian law. Hedayat, a founding member of the One Million Signatures campaign, a petition for women’s rights in Iran, was arrested after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. She fell foul of the authorities for speaking out about the post-election crackdown, especially for giving an interview to the BBC’s Persian service, which is loathed by the Iranian establishment.
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