Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi sentenced to death

According to Toomaj Salehi’s attorney, dissident rapper Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death for his participation in the widespread protests that swept through Iran in 2022.

“An order for the execution of Toomaj Salehi has been issued,” Salehi’s lawyer Amir Raesian tweeted Wednesday.

The rapper was reportedly tortured after being arrested, detained, and kept in solitary confinement.

According to Iranian pro-reform sites Shargh and Entekhab, an Isfahan court on Tuesday overturned the ruling of the higher Supreme Court in Saleh’s case, adopting the original finding of “corruption on earth” and imposing the death penalty as the maximum penalty. This is an unprecedented move.

Salehi, 32, was briefly released from jail last year before police brutally arrested him again and sent him to a prison in Isfahan, according to witnesses at the time. Salehi has been vocally critical of the Iranian regime and outspoken against the government in rap lyrics and on social media.

In a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), UN experts said that he was detained again after he made an appearance in a video in which he claimed to have been subjected to abuse and held in solitary confinement for 252 days after his arrest in October 2022.

Ye-One Rhie, a German member of parliament who supports Salehi politically in Europe, referred to Salehi’s death sentence as “absurd and inhumane.”

“It is still completely unclear how this verdict came about,” she tweeted Wednesday. “It is unbelievable how irresponsibly and arbitrarily the Iranian regime treats defendants. It is impossible to recognize the rule of law in the chaos of the courts in charge.”