The husband of a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer says she has been sentenced to 11 years in prison on charges including security offenses and spreading propaganda against the country's rulers.
Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested in September and spent more than three month in solitary confinement in Tehran. She is believed to be one of the first attorneys jailed from the group that represented activists and political figures rounded up in 2009 during unrest that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election.
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VOA interview with Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director, International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran:
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Her husband, Reza Khandan, said Monday he learned from Sotoudeh's lawyers she had been convicted and banned from working as a lawyer for 20 years. He said the sentence also bars her from traveling abroad.
The New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran called the sentence a "gross miscarriage of justice" and said Sotoudeh was jailed for upholding Iranian and international law.
Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi called for Sotoudeh's release last month, appealing to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights to push Iranian authorities to set her free.
