Ahmadi and eight members of a production team staged a concert that was livestreamed on her YouTube channel in 2024. During the performance, she sang the historic patriotic anthem “Az Khoon-e Javanan-e Vatan” (“From the Blood of the Youth of the Homeland”), and footage from the “Caravanserai Concert” later gained widespread attention online.
According to human rights activists, a criminal court in Qom Province handed Ahmadi and several musicians sentences that include flogging, a two-year travel ban, and a two-year prohibition from engaging in artistic activities.
While the ruling has not yet been published by Iran’s official judiciary news agency, lawyers and rights organizations who reportedly reviewed the court documents said the charges involve violating public decency through the production and distribution of what authorities described as “vulgar and immoral content” online.
Rights advocates argue that the sentence demonstrates that conditions for artists and civil liberties in Iran remain unchanged.
Bahar Ghandehari, Director of Advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said Ahmadi’s punishment of 74 lashes “is yet another reminder that human rights conditions in Iran have not changed, despite the Iranian authorities’ wartime propaganda campaign aimed at improving their image.”
She added that the prosecution of artists sharply contrasts with official narratives and highlights “the gap between the regime’s propaganda and reality”.
Reacting to the development, Fatemeh Shams, a professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “If you label this blatant violence with any name other than ‘crime against humanity’; if, in the midst of such an overt and undeniable battle against women, you speak of ‘peace’ but fail to hear the voices of the victims; if you pit ‘national interests’ against freedom, justice, human dignity, and the right to life; and if you call yourself ‘anti-war’ but remain silent in the face of a war that rages every day against women, girls, and political prisoners, then you have remained neither faithful to the truth nor to justice.”
Shams further wrote: “Peace is not merely the silencing of missile sounds or the subsiding of bombardment flames. Peace finds meaning only when the bodies of women and innocent protesters are no longer fields for unrestrained violence; when whips, torture, and nooses are no longer tools of governance.”
She added: “True and lasting peace becomes possible only when no woman is branded a criminal for working, studying, singing, or choosing her own lifestyle; and when no innocent human is consigned to dark prison cells and gallows for the crime of protesting, demanding justice, or expressing an opinion.”