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Monday, December 27, 2010

After Imprisonment for Blogging About Women's Rights, Iranian Teen Set Free | Women's Rights | Change.org

After Imprisonment for Blogging About Women's Rights, Iranian Teen Set Free | Women's Rights | Change.org

After Imprisonment for Blogging About Women's Rights, Iranian Teen Set Free

Bloggers are powerful people. Don't believe it? Iranian officials feared the power of a blogger so much, they had 18-year-old Navid Mohebbi arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for the desperate crime of keeping a blog supporting women's rights. If words on a blog didn't have great powers of change, why would they be so afraid of a teenager's musings?

Since we first covered Navid's imprisonment, hundreds of Change.org members signed on to a petition from A Safe World for Women, demanding the release of this admirable young defender of women's rights. On Christmas Day, that petition was successful.

Benjamin Joffe-Walt writes on the Human Rights cause that Navid received three years suspended sentence. "Suspended sentence" means unlock the cell doors, the boy's going free. Joffe-Walt refers to this as "likely a