Iran’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial, Raessian said, adding that the judges found that Salehi’s sentence of six years and three months for “spreading corruption on earth” “violated Iran’s serious criminal provisions and exceeded the statutory penalty.”
Iran’s ISNA news agency also reported that the Supreme Court had decided to overturn Salehi’s death sentence. Iran’s mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the case.
Salehi was detained in October 2022 after publicly supporting protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Martha Amini, who was detained for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic dress code for women. Weeks of protests have The movement, which united different factions of Iranian society and posed a major challenge to Iran’s clerical leadership, was ultimately suppressed by the country’s authoritarian regime.
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Salehi released two songs in support of the protests, one of which quotes the protesters’ slogan “Women, Life, Freedom”, while another, titled “Fortune Telling”, includes the lyrics: “It was someone’s sin that their hair was blowing in the wind”.
Salehi has been a rare voice of defiance in Iran, galvanizing the protest movement, and was one of several high-profile figures arrested across the country in a crackdown on protests over Amini’s death that has killed at least 500 people and detained tens of thousands, according to human rights groups.
Salehi was briefly released in November 2023, but was rearrested less than two weeks later after saying in a video that he had been tortured and held in solitary confinement.
When Salehi’s case reached the Supreme Court at the time, it asked a lower court to drop some of the charges against him, but a revolutionary court that’s part of Iran’s parallel judicial system restored jurisdiction and sentenced him to death in April, a sentence that was condemned by human rights groups, UN experts and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
A coalition of human rights groups defending Salehi welcomed the move by Iran’s Supreme Court.
“The lower court’s ruling is clearly unjust and we are pleased that Mr. Salehi will no longer face the threat of execution. The Supreme Court has determined that the death sentence handed down to Mr. Salehi was excessive and in violation of Iranian law,” Index on Censorship, the Human Rights Foundation and lawyers representing Salehi said in a statement on Saturday.
Negin Niknam, one of Salehi’s closest aides who manages his social media accounts from Germany, said the death sentence “put a lot of mental pressure” on Salehi, his friends and family. “They wasted a year of his life in prison, and now they just so easily revoke the death sentence,” she told The Washington Post. “Not all of us are celebrating this.”
“Mr Toomay’s soul has been harmed and our mental wellbeing has been harmed – all because of a sentence that should never have been handed down in the first place,” she added.
Since the protests over Amini’s death, authorities have further tightened their control over Iranian society. Shortly after the first anniversary of the protests, Iran’s parliament approved a bill imposing tougher penalties on those who violate women’s dress codes, including the mandatory hijab (headscarf). Iran’s Constitutional Council sent the bill back to parliament for reconsideration late last year.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came less than a week before a presidential election to replace Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash last month, and some protest activists and supporters have called for a boycott of the election.
In a statement, Index on Censorship said Salehi’s case would be returned to the lower court that originally sentenced him to death – Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court in Isfahan – for a new sentence, and called on the court to respect the rapper’s rights in the process.
“Even a short sentence would be unjust. Salehi has done nothing but demand that his fundamental rights and those of other Iranian citizens be respected,” the statement said.
Miriam Berger and Susanna George contributed to this report.
