Iran: Is the State Afraid of a 13-Year Old Girl?

Global Voices

Banning people from traveling abroad has been an old practice used by the Iranian state to raise pressure on political and civil society activists for years. However, a security court created a stir recently by banning foreign travel for jailed human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh’s husband and their 13-year-old daughter, Mehraveh Khandan. Nasrin Stoudeh has been sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Ensiloos writes [fa]:

Mehraveh's father says in his Facebook that even if his daughter, Mehraveh, had committed a crime, she should have been summoned to a court for minors, not to Evin [prison].

Haghemoslamema says [fa]:

We should activate a “campaign for innocent children” to let the whole world know about the Islamic regime [Iranian regime].The blogger asks with irony what is Mehraveh's crime: Being Nasrin Stoudeh's daughter, being a 13-year old kid, loving her parents, taking care of her younger brother… in reality only Ali Khamenei knows what crime this girl committed… we should not give up on Mehraveh's case, if not, all political prisoners' will be sent to Evin prison.

GreenCity wrote [fa] only on July 8, 2012, that the Head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, Javad Larijani, publicly denied the existence of political prisoners in Iran. Today, Monday 16 July, Mehraveh's case came to light.

Jomhouriat writes [fa], “my country is proud of this innocent girl whose travel ban shows the [Iranian] Islamic Republic is collapsing.”

It is not the first time Nasrin's children have highlighted the pain of political prisoners' families. About a month ago, Iranian social networking site users shared the following video footage of Nasrin Sotoudeh trying to play with her four year old son through a window in a prison visit.