Sanremo’s Club Tenco calls for “the immediate release of the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, sentenced to death by the revolutionary court of Isfahan for ‘corruption on earth’. The sentence is due to the songs that Salehi wrote to support the protests against the death of Mahsa Amini, killed by Iranian police on September 16, 2022, accused of not wearing the headscarf properly.” Club Tenco writes this in a note. Arrested in October 2022 during the protests of the Donna, Vita, Libertà movement, Salehi was sentenced to six years and three months in prison. After over a year in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court and he was released in November ’23. Twelve days later, however, he was arrested again for having denounced in a video the torture he suffered in prison. “Now – writes Club Tenco – we have received news of this ‘cruel attack on fundamental freedoms'”. In spring 2020, the Tenco club recalls, “shocked by the death of three members of the Turkish band Grup Yorum, censored and imprisoned by the Erdogan regime, we created the Yorum award with Amnesty International Italia to give visibility to artists who risk their lives to defend democracy and freedom of expression – the note continues – that same spring 2020, the videomaker Shady Habash died in the Egyptian prison while awaiting trial for having shot the video for Balaha, a ferocious satire of the Egyptian dictator. author of the lyrics of that song, Galal El-Behairy, has been locked up in prison for over six years, convicted for having written ‘The finest women on earth’. The interpreter of Balaha, Ramy Essam, voice of the revolution of Tahrir Square and winner Yorum 2020, has been living in exile for a decade. Even the Syrian-Palestinian musician Aeham Ahmad, winner of Yorum 2023, had to flee his country. We can no longer and do not want to remain silent in the face of another condemnation of an artist who risks his life just for having expressed his thoughts – concludes Club Tenco -. You can’t be killed for a song, a poem or a video clip. We invite all artists, civil society and Italian, European and international institutions to mobilize to save Salehi’s life and demand his immediate release.”
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