Iran's Revolutionary Court has sentenced a Grammy-award-winning Iranian singer to nearly four years in prison for his award-winning song and ordered him to write a new song against the United States.
Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that Shervin Hajipour received three years in prison for “inciting people to cause unrest against national security,” and an additional eight months for “spreading propaganda against the regime."
Hajipour was arrested for his song “Baraye,” a track critical of Iran's ruling regime about a woman who refuses to wear the hijab. "Baraye" served as a tribute to Mahsa Amini, the young woman who died in police custody in Iran after being arrested for not wearing her hijab correctly and whose death sparked months of protests against the Iranian government's oppression of women.
In addition to his jail sentence, the court ordered Hajipour to write a song criticizing the “USA’s atrocities against humanity," to compile and share the Islamic Revolution's "achievements" in culture, science, and art on his internet platform, to write summaries of two books on the status of women in Iran, and to collect cases of alleged human rights violations by the US for the last two hundred years.
He is also banned from leaving Iran for two years.
Hajipour was presented with the 2023 Grammy Award in absentia by US First Lady Jill Biden. He was the first winner of the Song for Social Change award.
Hajipour was arrested in 2022 after his song became an unofficial anthem of the anti-regime protests.