Doing Hard Time in Iranian Prison for… Blogging
Hossein Derakhshan will spend his 36th birthday in Iran’s Evin Prison and possibly 19 more.
His crime: blogging.
Otherwise known by the Iranian government as, “propagating against the regime, propagation in favor of anti-revolutionary groups, insulting sanctities, and implementation and management of obscene web-sites.” Paris-based Reporters Without Borders says the jail sentence given by an Iranian court this week is the longest ever imposed on a blogger in Iran.
Derakhshan blogged under the nickname Hoder and was refererred to as “Blogfather,” in the Persian language Web world.