Jailed human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been granted temporary release, the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan Online news website reports.
“Sotoudeh… has been released temporarily, with the consent of the prosecutor in charge of women’s prisons,” the website says.
Her husband Reza Khandan later confirms the news on Twitter.
“Friends, Nasrin came out on furlough minutes ago.”
Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh in her office in Tehran, Iran, on November 1, 2008. (AP/Arash Ashourinia/File)
The UN had called on Iran to free Sotoudeh, a winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize, as well as other political prisoners excluded from a push to empty jails amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The lawyer was moved in late October from Tehran’s Evin prison to a women’s detention center outside the capital, while her family insisted she needed hospital treatment.
In August, she announced that she was going on a hunger strike to demand the release of political prisoners and to focus attention on their plight due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But health issues prompted the 57-year-old Sotoudeh to stop the hunger strike more than 45 days after she started it, her husband said in September.
Sotoudeh was sentenced in 2019 to serve 12 years in jail for defending women arrested for protesting compulsory headscarf laws in the Islamic Republic.
— AFP
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