Remember When The Iranian President Said No Gays in Iran? The Journalist Who Disproved Still in Jail

Iranian journalist Siamak Ghaderi, who worked with state news agency, Irna, was sentenced to four years in jail. Photograph: Guardian

In September 2007, when the then Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, denied, to the jeers of the audience at Columbia University in New York, that homosexuals existed in the Islamic republic, one journalist back home was determined to prove him wrong.

Siamak Ghaderi, who worked as a reporter with the state news agency, Irna, challenged Ahmadinejad's comments by conducting a series of interviews with Iranian homosexuals and publishing them online. But this came at a price.

In the aftermath of Iran's disputed presidential election in 2009, Ghaderi could not face the amount of censorship imposed on Iranian media and instead set up his own blog, called "Our Irna", in which he reported on the popular unrest that was unfolding.

His blog was filtered and in August 2010 security officials picked him up from his house and took him to prison. There, he was held in solitary confinement and was refused access to his lawyer or his family for a long time.

In January 2011, a court in Tehran sentenced him to four years in jail, 60 lashes and a fine for his work as a journalist, including interviews with Iran's gay community.

He was convicted of a number of charges, including "insulting the president", "spreading propaganda against the regime", "acting against the national security" – vague accusations used against many political activists and human rights campaigners in Iran in recent years.

The release in recent weeks of a number of political prisoners in Iran raised hopes that Ghaderi may be among them, but his wife, Farzaneh Mirzavand, told the Guardian that there was no such news. The veteran Iranian journalist Isa Saharkhiz, who was imprisoned for "insulting Iran's supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is among those freed.

According to Amnesty International, Ghaderi was among at least 14 political prisoners reported to have been flogged in jail in 2012.

In May, Mirzavand told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that her husband had not been given leave from prison since his arrest.

"During these entire three years, we were perhaps able to see him in person two or three times," she said. "I don't wish to pursue this [the issue of furlough] any more, because it basically appears as though the follow-ups don't have any impact. They made the decisions themselves and they carry them out themselves.
"Simak insists that I no longer get myself tied up in trips to the prosecutor's office. Siamak tells me: 'Live your life; most of [my sentence] has passed and only some of it is left, which I will endure.’”

theguardian.com