A 19-year prison sentenced handed to a Canadian-Iranian credited with starting the blogging movement in Iran is “unacceptable and unjustifiable,” the Canadian government said Tuesday, AFP reports.<\/p>\n
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Hossein Derakhshan, 35, was convicted in Iran of collaborating with “enemy states and of propaganda against the Islamic system,” the conservative Mashreghnews website reported, quoting a judicial source.<\/p>\n
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The court also found him guilty of “promoting counterrevolutionary cells and insulting Islamic sanctities.”<\/p>\n
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“We are deeply concerned about the news of this severe sentence,” Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said. “If true, this is completely unacceptable and unjustifiable.”<\/p>\n
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“No one should be punished anywhere for simply exercising one’s inherent right to freedom of expression,” he said, adding that “Iran must release him.”<\/p>\n
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In 2001, Derakhshan sparked a blogging revolution in Iran by posting precise instructions on how to set up Persian-language blogs.<\/p>\n
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He visited Iran’s arch-foe Israel on his Canadian passport in 2006. He chronicled his experience on his Persian- and English-language blogs, saying he sought to show Israelis and Iranians a different image of each country.<\/p>\n
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He was arrested after returning to Iran in November 2008.<\/p>\n
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Derakhshan was handed a 19-and-a-half year sentence and also banned from media activity for five years, the Mashreghnews website reported without clarifying if that was from the time of his eventual release.<\/p>\n
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Fars news agency quoted another source as confirming the ruling, adding that Derakhshan may appeal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A 19-year prison…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[16333,14939,16334],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46390"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}