Conditional Release Order Issued for Bahareh Hedayat

Zahra Minewi, the lawyer for Bahareh Hedayat, a civil rights activist, announced that Branch 54 of the Revolutionary Court has agreed to the conditional release of her client. This lawyer wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday, February 10, that the conditional release order was issued after Hedayat served one and a half years in prison and faced a one-year suspension of execution due to her illness. Bahareh Hedayat also confirmed this news on her Instagram page, stating: 'My conditional release has been approved.' This imprisoned civil rights activist, who had been granted leave from Evin Prison due to her illness, will now be conditionally released with the approval of the Revolutionary Court and will not return to prison. Hedayat was sentenced by the Tehran Revolutionary Court to four years and eight months of imprisonment, two years of deprivation from membership in political and social groups, and three months of community service in a nursing home in connection with her protests against the downing of the Ukrainian plane by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in January 2020. This sentence was upheld in the appeals court. She was arrested in October 2022 and transferred to Evin Prison in November of that year to serve her sentence. However, in late February 2023, the news site 'Emtidad' announced that Bahareh Hedayat had been transferred from Evin Prison to the hospital for internal surgery. The website reported that 'based on forensic medical opinion, judicial authorities agreed to a 10-day suspension of this civil rights activist's prison sentence for recovery after surgery.' Despite the need to follow up on her treatment, Hedayat was called back to prison. In a note she published in March of that year on the occasion of her 43rd birthday, she revealed that she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer and noted that due to the Nowruz holidays and the unavailability of her treating physician, her cancer treatment had not progressed significantly. However, in late April, she also wrote in a note on her Instagram that despite her illness, prison officials had informed her lawyer that they opposed extending her sentence suspension and that continuing her treatment in prison was 'possible.' She wrote that she had to return to prison on April 18. On Sunday, at the end of her conditional release post on Instagram, she wrote: 'In hopes of freeing my homeland from the darkness that has tainted it for 46 years.'