Toomaj Salehi, the Iranian musician who won worldwide recognition after being sentenced to death for the “crime” of speaking out against the Islamic regime’s misogynistic oppression of women has finally been released from prison after 753 days.

Earlier this year, Salehi was convicted of “spreading corruption on earth” — a capital offence under Article 286 of the country’s Islamic Penal Code — after he publicly backed the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, a series of widespread demonstrations that began in September 2022.

The movement was sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman after she was detained by Iran’s morality police on 13 September 2022 in Tehran for the crime of wearing her hijab “improperly”. Four days later, and whilst still in police custody, she fell into a coma and died.

Although the authorities claimed the healthy 22-year-old with no known medical issues suffered a sudden heart attack, eyewitnesses said that following her arrest the police pushed her into a van and subjected her to torture and other ill-treatment, including beatings to the head. A United Nations fact-finding mission in March 2024 concluded that her death was unlawful and caused by “physical violence in the custody of state authorities”.

In the aftermath of Amini’s death, many women defied the country’s Islamic law to cast off their headscarves during a massive wave of protests which were violently curbed by authorities. The months-long protest movement sparked by her murder represented one of the most serious challenges to the regime in recent years. By early 2023, human rights organizations reported hundreds of deaths — including children — and thousands of arrests.

Salehi had long been a voice of anti-government dissent in Iran, using his music and social media posts to make political statements criticising the repressive nature of the Iranian regime.

Rap is one of several types of music effectively banned in Iran, a fact that has only added to its appeal among the country’s increasingly alienated young people. 

During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, Salehi — who has 2.6 million followers on Instagram — actively encouraged fellow Iranians to demonstrate against the authorities, and shared videos of himself participating with protesters in the streets.

“Someone’s crime was dancing with her hair in the wind, someone’s crime was that he or she was brave and outspoken”, read the lyrics in one of his songs from October 2022, posted shortly before his arrest.

The Iranian regime has ramped-up the political abuse of psychiatry to a level arguably not seen since the 1970s

In April 2024, a lower court in Isfahan found him guilty of the capital offence of “spreading corruption on Earth”, as well as the lesser offence of “assistance in sedition, assembly and collusion, propaganda against the state and calling for riots”, which is punishable by two to five years’ imprisonment.

His case was taken up by Amnesty International, who describe his trial as “grossly unfair”, and note that authorities “dismissed his complaints of torture, including electric shocks, death threats and repeated beatings resulting in bone fractures and vision impairment in one eye”.

Salehi’s death sentence sparked international outcry, with more than 100 high-profile figures from the world of culture and entertainment signing a statement calling for his release.

After the verdict was announced, U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel condemned the Iranian regime’s use of the death sentence as a “tool to suppress people’s human rights and fundamental freedoms”, with the Biden-Harris administration subsequently imposing financial sanctions against 12 high-ranking Iranian officials, one of whom administers the province where Salehi was tortured whilst in prison.

Following this international pressure, in June 2024 Iran’s Supreme Court overturned Salehi’s death sentence.

The exact political considerations behind the commutation have never been made public, although with the country’s economy continuing to falter, food prices escalating and hardline president Ebrahim Raisi having been killed a month beforehand in a helicopter crash, the regime is rumoured to have been split over the policy of targeting high-profile protesters.

Despite Salehi’s death sentence being overturned, he remained in custody on a series of overlapping and shifting charges.

He was eventually released from prison on 1 December, according to the state-run Mizan news agency.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher, international counsel for Mr Salehi’s family, who works with the Index on Censorship and Human Rights Foundation, celebrated his release but also credited it to sustained pressure put on the Iranian authorities from both inside and outside the country.

“This is also a time for vigilance,” she cautioned. “We must ensure Mr Salehi remains free and is never again subjected to the egregious violations of his rights.”

Salehi’s sponsor in Europe, German member of parliament Ye-One Rhie concurred, posting on X: “We should remain cautious and keep both eyes on his freedom and safety. Especially with how sudden his release happened tonight.”

In a joint statement, Salehi’s cousin Arezou Eghbali Babadi and friend Negin Niknaa, thanked the international community for playing a “crucial role” in the release of Salehi, but went on to foreground the continuing dire state of civil liberties in the country.

“We must not lose sight”, they said, “of the unlawful and oppressive rules that continue to exert severe psychological pressure on freedom seekers, their families, and society as a whole in Iran.”

This reference to “psychological pressure” holds a more troubling meaning than is perhaps immediately discernible to the eye of a western reader now utterly fatigued by the proliferation of trigger warnings, microaggressions and safe spaces.

The forced transfer of peaceful protesters, dissidents, and political prisoners to psychiatric hospitals as tools of repression to delegitimize acts of protest and silence dissenting voices has become a routine practice by the country’s authorities since the “Women, Life, Freedom” first erupted.

Psychiatry has of course always been a highly normative discipline, its role one of controlling those who transgress social norms – witness, for instance, the “protest psychosis” diagnosis of schizophrenia for young black Americans demanding their civil rights, the use of psychopharmaceuticals for women who struggled to conform to the forms of life allotted to them, or even the UK government’s recently announced plan to require children who download ‘terrorism content’ to undergo psychiatric treatment. 

Even so, the Iranian regime has now ramped-up the political abuse of psychiatry to a level arguably not seen since the 1970s, when Soviet psychiatrists would regularly confine in psychiatric hospitals any ideologically wavering comrades displaying worrying symptoms such as a desire to “reform society” or “struggle for the truth” under a diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia”. 

Witness, for instance, the female student at a university in Tehran who recently stripped to her underwear in an act of public protest over the country’s strict Islamic dress code after being harassed by campus security officers for not wearing a hijab.

About a dozen security guards were captured on video forcibly bundling the young woman into a vehicle. “Oh God, how many of them are attacking just one person?” one onlooker can be heard saying. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” another said.

Amir Kabir newsletter reported that she suffered injuries during the arrest, including severe head trauma after being struck against a vehicle. Witnesses said traces of blood were visible at the scene.

Mohammad Ghorbani, spokesperson for Islamic Azad University, said that the student was taken to a psychiatric hospital. Naturally, there has been no further information about her whereabouts or condition.

Melika Gharegozlou, a journalism student and well-known student activist at Allameh Tabataba’i University, was arrested on 2 October 2022 and sentenced to over four years in prison for posting a video of herself without the state-mandated headscarf. She was then forcibly transferred to the Aminabad Psychiatric Hospital in Tehran against her consent where she was reportedly tortured.

In July 2023 Iranian courts “diagnosed” three prominent actresses — Afsaneh Bayegan, Azadeh Samadi and Leila Bolukat — with mental illnesses after they appeared in public without the mandatory hijab. This judicial action sparked controversy, with leading psychiatrists condemning the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses to suppress dissent.

Four months later, footage emerged showing a young woman, Roya Zakeri, in Tabriz shouting “death to the dictator” and “death to Khamenei” after being harassed by morality police over her hijab. Having arrested her, security forces beat her until she lost consciousness and then transferred her to Razi Hospital, a neurology and psychiatry facility in Tabriz, claiming she had a mental illness and was experiencing delusions.

And so on and so forth.

As it happens, news of Toomaj Salehi’s release from prison comes just as a new bill makes its way through the country’s parliament, which will harden regulations governing how citizens dress in public.

According to Article 50 of the contentious hijab and chastity bill, anyone found “naked, semi-naked, or wearing clothing deemed improper in public” will be immediately arrested and handed over to judicial authorities. The bill also implements gender segregation across a wide range of settings, including universities, administrative centres, educational institutions, parks, tourist locations and even in hospital treatment sections.

People found in breach of the new rules also face a ban on leaving the country and using the internet for a period of six months to two years.

So, yes, Toomaj Salehi’s release from custody is undoubtedly cause for celebration. But the fact that the Iranian regime continues to take concerted, insidious action to pathologise and incarcerate those who dare to stand up for women’s bodily autonomy and freedom from oppressive, neo-medieval state regulations, suggests that this is no time for the world to look away.