The mum of a released Iranian political prisoner has been jailed for criticising her son's treatment behind bars.
Farangis Mazlum, 55, blasted the conditions her son Soheil Arabi, a photojournalist, had endured.
But now she has been jailed for 18 months after being found guilty of "propaganda against the regime" and "conspiracy to commit crime".
Medics had told the court that heart attack and stroke victim Farangis was too frail to be imprisoned.
However, she has been sent to Evin Prison in the Iranian capital, Tehran, to begin her sentence.
Her son was freed in November after serving seven and a half years in jail.
He had initially been sentenced to death but this was later commuted to imprisonment
His mother had gone to the Iranian parliament to petition Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 83, to pardon her son, in 2019.
Her son, Arabi, said on social media last week: "Justice has become so feeble that my own mother has been thrown in jail."
He told the news outlet IranWire: "The verdict against my mother is mainly related to her activities after 2017.
"She repeatedly spoke to the media about my case and, as time passed, she grew angrier."
Arabi added: "She was no longer content to be a defender of just her own son.
"After I was imprisoned, she came to know [other] civil and political activists, and her years-long anger exploded into rage against fanatics, the patriarchy, and injustice.
"She went from being a mother to a fighter."
Arabi reportedly said that the charge of disseminating propaganda against the regime came about because his mum had "told the truth" about conditions in Iran's prisons.
His mum was also charged with cooperating with an opposition group called the People's Mojahedin Organization (MEK), a charge that Arabi reportedly dismissed as "baseless and absurd".
Arabi described his mum as a "freethinker" who has been shunned by her family.
He said she has no political leanings but enjoys the work of American writer and activist Emma Goldman, the Italian revolutionary Errico Malatesta and the Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
He said: "She’s also fond of Chekhov and Dostoevsky."
Arabi added: "But she’s not dogmatic about anything. My mother is consumed with curiosity, and as such, she doesn’t imprison herself in any ideological cage.”
He said that the Iranian authorities had wanted her jailed because he himself was still expressing himself freely online.
Recalling his own arrest in November 2013, Arabi reportedly said: “I was arrested and sentenced to death because I created a Facebook page called ‘A Generation that Does Not Want to Remain a Wasted Generation’.
"But in the last few years, I discovered that many generations have been wasted and, if we can find each other, and put our minds and our abilities together, we can make fundamental changes, make things better.
“Farangis Mazlum is not merely the person who gave birth to me, and who brought me up despite all the obstacles, and in the face of poverty. She is my comrade-in-arms in the battle.
"People like her are on the vanguard of the fight against reactionaries, inequality, patriarchy, and every kind of injustice.
"When a person is thrown in jail, first the family is harmed, then the whole of society.”
Iran has a poor human rights record, with the United Nations deploring crackdowns on civil society in the country.
Iran has the death penalty and is known to execute minors despite being a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
By which the country's government is supposed to have agreed not to execute people for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.
In response to criticism from the UN, last year, in 2021, Majid Tafreshi of Iran's state-run High Council for Human Rights claimed that the country's use of the death penalty did not violate human rights.
Tafreshi told AFP at the time: "When we are talking about under-18s, we are not talking about six or five years old.
'We are talking about mainly our 17 years old big boys (where) the court recognised their maturity."
