 Professional Background
Yaghoub Yadali is an award-winning writer who has published novels, short stories, articles, and cultural commentaries.
Current Status
In September 2007, novelist Yaghoub Yadali was sentenced to one year in prison on charges of “insult.” The sentence includes time already served in jail, and the remaining nine months are suspended. The conviction stems from his depictions of characters from the Lor ethnic minority, of which Yadali is himself a member, in his fiction. PEN considers Yadali to be sentenced in violation of his right to freedom of expression, and calls for his conviction to be quashed in accordance with Article 19 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory.
Case History
Yaghoub Yadali was arrested on March 15, 2007 and detained for 41 days on charges of insult, libel and publication of false information in two of his fictional works: a collection of six short stories entitled Sketches in the Garden (Aasa Publications, Tehran, 1997) and parts of his novel Rituals of Restlessness (Niloufar publications, Tehran, 2004). Both had been granted approval for publication from Iran’s Ministry of Guidance. An excerpt from the novel, Rituals of Restlessness, featuring a rural Lor woman who is described as an immoral person, is quoted by the prosecutor in the indictment. Yaghoub Yadali is himself a member of the Lor ethnic minority, and is an award-winning writer in the region.
Yadali was tried at a court in the city of Yasuj, capital of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, southwestern Iran, on August 23, 2007. He was convicted and sentenced in September 2007 to one year’s imprisonment for "insulting in order to agitate the general public." Nine months of the sentence are suspended for two years, conditional on his writing four articles in the local news papers on art and cultural personalities of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, published at his own expense.
Born in 1970, Yaghoub Yadali is a prominent writer who has also worked as a television director, making documentaries and writing screenplays. In addition to the works for which he was sentenced, he has also published Probability of Merriment and Mooning (Nim-negah Publications, Shiraz, 2001), a collection of eight short stories for which he won the Press Critics Annual Prize in 2001, and many articles and cultural commentaries in newspapers and journals. Since his arrest Yadali has been banned from publishing, and his books have been withdrawn from the market. He has also been dismissed from his job, and is now unemployed and without financial support. |
| |
|
 |
|
