Siamak Qaderi

Four years in prison and 60 lashes. That’s the sentence that the journalist and blogger Siamak Qaderi received in January 2011 after being fired by the government news agency IRNA. He was convicted of using his blog to disseminate anti-government propaganda and false information “liable to disrupt public order.” His crime was not just investigating the everyday lives of his fellow citizens and criticizing government policies. Above all, it was interviewing gays and posting the results of his interviews on his blog. Because, since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s famous comment during a visit to the United States in September 2007, everyone knows that “there are no homosexuals in Iran.”