Aras Amiri's 10-year prison sentence confirmed by the Court of Appeal
The Court of Appeal has upheld the 10-year prison sentence of Aras Amiri, a student and former employee of the British Council.
Mohsen Omrani, Aras Amiri's cousin, announced the news on his Twitter page, writing, "Three months after the Aras Court of First Instance issued its verdict, without the presence of the defendant or his lawyer, the court of first instance's verdict was confirmed (10 years), and two years later he was banned from work and banned from leaving!"
Aras Amiri, an employee of the British Council who had traveled to Iran many times to visit his family members, was arrested by intelligence officials in March 2017, five days after entering Iran. After some time, he was released from Evin Prison in 2018 after posting a bail of 500 million Tomans.
After his release, this Iranian student at Kingston University in the UK was arrested again in September 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in May of this year.
In recent years, several Iranians living in the UK have been arrested after traveling to Iran, including Nazanin Zaghari, who was arrested by IRGC agents along with her young daughter at Tehran's Imam Khomeini Airport about three years ago while returning to London and sentenced to five years in prison by a court.
The arrest of dual nationals is a common occurrence in Iran, and Western analysts say the Islamic Republic uses dual nationals as hostages to obtain money and privileges from Western governments.
In addition to Aras Amiri and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, several other American and non-American citizens—including Siamak and Bagher Namazi, Michael White, and Zhiyu Wang—are currently imprisoned in Iran. The fate of Robert Levinson, another American citizen who disappeared in Iran more than a dozen years ago, is also unknown.
The United States Department of State has repeatedly condemned the Islamic Republic's regime's arbitrary and unjustified detention of American and other citizens, including dual-national Iranians, and called for their immediate and unconditional release.
Source: Voice of America
