Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani, 31, and Elham Choubdar, 24, were found guilty of a number of charges by a court in Urmia, Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, on September 1, but details of their sentences were only released this week . According to Hangaw, a Kurdish human rights group, Seddiqi Hamedani and Choubdar were found guilty of “corruption on Earth” for “promoting homosexuality”, “promoting Christianity” and “contacting the media opposed to the Islamic Republic”. They were also found guilty of sex trafficking, a charge that human rights activists say is trumped up. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and punishable by death under the sharia penal code. Seddiqi Hamedani was arrested in Iran in October 2021 as she tried to cross the border into Turkey, where she hoped to seek asylum. In May of that year, he appeared in a documentary for the BBC’s Persian service, talking about the abuse faced by the LGBTQ+ community in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where he was living at the time. After the documentary aired in May, Seddiqi Hamedani was detained for 21 days by Asayish, the intelligence and security agency of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He was subjected to torture, including beatings, electric shocks and prolonged solitary confinement, Amnesty International said. Before attempting to cross the border between Iran and Turkey, Seddiqi Hamedani sent a video message to 6Rang, an Iranian lesbian network based in Germany, which will be published if she is arrested. “They can arrest me at any moment because they have all the information about me… my life is in real danger,” said a visibly upset Seddiqi Hamedani. “If I don’t arrive [in Turkey]it is clear what happened. “I want to let you know how much we suffer as an LGBTQ community and we resist … whether it’s death or freedom, we stay true to ourselves.” Shadi Amin, from 6Rang, said: “They [Seddiqi Hamedan and Choubdar] heard the proposal last week. Since then Zahra has not slept. She’s angry.” “Without international support, we have no hope,” Amin added. Soma Rostami, from Hengaw, said Seddiqi Hamedani and Choubdar had no access to a lawyer. Rostami added that Sediki Hamedani’s Kurdish ethnicity may have contributed to the harsh sentence she received. In July, a state news agency published a video of two people who claimed that Seddiqi Hamedani trafficked Iranian women abroad. 6Rang says the people in the video were inmates who testified under duress. Amin dismissed the trafficking allegations as “propaganda” and part of a government strategy to discredit Seddiqi Hamedani. Arsham Parsi, an Iranian LGBTQ+ rights activist based in Canada, said: “In most cases of executions of Iranian LGBT+ people in the past, the government tried to link people to violent crimes such as rape or violating national security. “They always exaggerate the charges to make them look like dangerous people who should be executed,” he said. News of the conviction came after Iran’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, addressed parliament condemning homosexuality on September 1. Raisi, who was elected a year ago, had previously referred to homosexuality as “nothing but savagery”. His government has also launched a crackdown on women’s rights activists in recent months. Amnesty International has warned of a “horrific wave of executions” in the country after the easing of Covid restrictions. According to the group, at least 281 people were executed in the first half of 2022. Most were convicted of murder, with Amnesty describing “well-documented patterns of executions carried out systematically after grossly unfair trials”. Parsi said: “This execution [sentence] it is, I think, mainly politics.” He added that he had been in contact with Seddiqi Hamedani on social media over the years. “He asked me what I thought about the BBC interview,” he said. “I told her it was dangerous, that she should wait until she was safe in Turkey or do it anonymously. But she was determined. I haven’t heard from her since. “I don’t want to wake up and find out it’s too late — that he’s been executed,” Parsi said. “We need international pressure.”
