Iranian Film-Maker Jafar Panahi Handed New Five-Year Prison Term in Absentia

An Iranian court has sentenced the award-winning director Jafar Panahi to five years and one month in prison and ordered the confiscation of all his assets. The ruling was issued in absentia, according to his lawyer, Mostafa Nili, who spoke to the Iranian news outlet Emtedad.

Panahi, 66, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year for It Was Just an Accident. Nili said the court also imposed a two-year travel ban and a two-year bar on his use of social media. The specific charges behind the new sentence remain unclear.

A friend of the film-maker, an activist based in Europe, told the Associated Press that he spoke with Panahi on Monday evening after the sentencing and that Panahi had not been detained.

Panahi returned to Iran in March from an overseas trip to promote It Was Just an Accident. He did so despite having been sentenced in absentia last year to one year in prison for "propaganda activities against the system".

According to Nili, Panahi currently faces three open legal cases and was never told the date of the hearing in the latest one. The lawyer said he learned of the proceedings only after his client's bank accounts were frozen last week.

Moein Khazaeli, a human rights lawyer at Dadban, a legal counselling centre for Iranian activists, said the sentence and the seizure of Panahi's assets could breach Iran's constitution. That would be the case unless the authorities establish a clear legal basis linking the property to an alleged offence.

Earlier this year, speaking to the Guardian while in the US, Panahi warned that the current "cycle of violence" in Iran could continue. "What I have been depicting in this film is when the cycle of violence continues, then it becomes very difficult to stop it," he said.

The ruling has alarmed other artists. Setareh Maleki, an Iranian actor forced into exile after starring in Mohammad Rasoulof's Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig, said a dictatorship fears losing control over the stories people tell. She said Panahi's sentence "proves once again just how deeply the Islamic Republic fears even the act of storytelling".

A film-maker who is currently shooting a project in secret inside Iran, and asked not to be named, voiced support for Panahi. She said she believed the sentence was linked to his calls for unity during the January protests and his backing for diverse voices in Iran, including supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's former shah. Iranian-British actor Nazanin Boniadi also condemned the ruling as "yet another attempt to silence a courageous artist".

A recent report from the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran warned that authorities are intensifying their crackdown on artists, writers, poets, musicians and other cultural figures, pulling them into the same coercive security and judicial apparatus used to suppress dissent across the country.