PARIS (AP) — Activists laid flowers close to the Iranian Embassy in Paris on Monday to indicate assist for a ladies’s rights campaigner sentenced to jail after handing out flowers to ladies on the Tehran metro whereas not sporting a headband.
Monday’s protest on a sq. close to the embassy, organized by Amnesty Worldwide, was timed to mark Worldwide Girls’s Day. It was additionally meant to indicate assist for different activists combating for human rights in Iran.
On Worldwide Girls’s Day in 2019, Yasaman Aryani, her mom Monireh Arabshahi and Mojgan Keshavarz handed out flowers to feminine passengers on the Tehran metro and spoke of a day when ladies have the liberty to decide on what they put on. The activists weren’t sporting headscarves and posted a video exhibiting the motion that drew widespread consideration.
Aryani and her mom have been every sentenced to 16 years in jail for “inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution,” although the sentence was later diminished.
Over latest years, dozens of Iranian ladies have been detained for protesting the obligatory sporting of the hijab. A number of ladies’s rights activists additionally stay in jail, reminiscent of distinguished Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. She grew to become recognized for defending activists, opposition politicians and ladies prosecuted for eradicating their headscarves
The hijab and chador — the flowing, all-encompassing gown for girls — have lengthy been elements of Persian tradition. They grew to become political symbols in 1936, when Iran’s pro-Western ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi banned the clothes amid his efforts to quickly modernize Iran. The ban grew to become a supply of humiliation for some pious Muslim ladies within the nation.
Because the 1979 Islamic Revolution took maintain, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered feminine civil servants to put on the chador. The hijab and loose-fitting clothes later grew to become obligatory for all ladies in Iran.
