Ares Amiri’s 10-Year Prison Sentence Confirmed by Appeals Court
The appeals court has upheld the original verdict of a 10-year prison sentence for Ares Amiri, a student and former employee of the British Council.
Mohsen Omrani, Ares Amiri’s cousin, announced the news on his Twitter page, writing that “after three months from the issuance of the primary court’s verdict for Ares, without the defendant and lawyer being present, the primary court’s sentence has been upheld (10 years) and he has also been banned from employment and forbidden from leaving the country for two years!”
Ares Amiri, an employee of the British Council who had traveled to Iran several times to visit family members, was arrested five days after entering Iran in March 2018 by Ministry of Intelligence officers. After some time, in 2018, he was released from Evin Prison after posting a 500 million tomans bail.
The Iranian student at Kingston University in Britain was arrested again in September 2018 and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2019.
In recent years, several Iranians residing in Britain have been arrested upon traveling to Iran. Among them is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was arrested about three years ago upon returning to London by Revolutionary Guards along with her young daughter at Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran and was sentenced to five years in prison by the court.
The detention of dual nationals in Iran has precedent, and Western analysts say the Islamic Republic uses dual nationals as hostages to extract money and concessions from Western governments.
Currently, in addition to Ares Amiri and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, several American and non-American citizens—including Siamak and Baquer Namazi, Michael White, and Xiyue Wang—are imprisoned in Iran. There is no information about the fate of Robert Levinson, another American citizen who disappeared in Iran more than twelve years ago.
The U.S. State Department has repeatedly condemned the arbitrary and unjustified detention of American citizens and citizens of other countries, including Iranian dual nationals, by the Islamic Republic regime and has called for their immediate and unconditional release.
Source: Voice of America
