Iranian singer sentenced to 74 lashes for performing without hijab, says human rights group

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The criminal court of Qom province sentenced the 29-year-old to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on engaging in artistic activities, according to court documents.

The charges include offending public decency by the production and publication of “vulgar and immoral content” online.

In the video of the “Caravanserai Concert," Ms Ahmadi sang a historic patriotic anthem, ‘Az Khoon-e Javanan-e Vatan’ (‘From the Blood of the Youth of the Homeland’).

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She was briefly detained along with several musicians shortly after its release before being freed. Authorities later filed a formal complaint over the video, which has since gone viral.

Rights groups and lawyers who reviewed the court documents say the arrest reflects a broader effort to deter cultural dissent.

The official judiciary news agency has yet to publish the ruling, according to The Guardian.

Bahar Ghandehari, the director of advocacy at the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, said: “Ahmadi’s punishment of 74 lashes for merely singing and appearing without a hijab is yet another reminder that human rights conditions in Iran have not changed, despite the Iranian authorities’ wartime propaganda campaign aimed at improving their image.”

She added that the contrast between official imagery and the prosecution of artists exposed “the gap between the regime’s propaganda and reality”.

Moein Khazaeli, a human rights lawyer at Dadban, a legal counselling centre for Iranian activists, said the sentence lacked legal basis.

“Singing, performing music and producing or disseminating musical works by women are not criminalised under Iranian criminal law. Consequently, such activities cannot reasonably be construed as the ‘production, distribution or publication of obscene content’,” he said.

“The imposition of a flogging sentence against artists, civil society activists or other citizens is not merely a matter of domestic criminal law. It also raises serious concerns regarding states’ international obligations to prohibit torture and safeguard human dignity.“

"For this reason, numerous human rights organisations consider flogging not a legitimate form of punishment, but rather a form of torture and inhuman treatment.”

Fatemeh Shams, a professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “If you label this blatant violence with any name other than “crime against humanity”; if, in the midst of such an overt and undeniable battle against women, you speak of “peace” but fail to hear the voices of the victims...then you have remained neither faithful to the truth nor to justice.”

She added: “Peace is not merely the silencing of missile sounds or the subsiding of bombardment flames"

"Peace finds meaning only when the bodies of women and innocent protesters are no longer fields for unrestrained violence; when whips, torture, and nooses are no longer tools of governance.”

The Iranian-British actor Nazanin Boniadi said: “The sentencing of singer Parastoo Ahmadi to flogging for the simple act of singing publicly without a hijab is a stark reminder that, despite talk in Washington of a ‘new regime’ in Iran, the Islamic republic’s machinery of repression remains unchanged.