Acclaimed Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery has been sentenced to 15 years in prison under a law enacted after a 2025 conflict between Iran and Israel. The legislation, intended to combat espionage and cooperation with hostile states, was applied to Moaiery for her reporting and photographs.
Moaiery, known for her documentation of dissent and the lives of women in Iran, learned of her sentence on Iran’s National Journalist Day. She stated that upon arriving at Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, she was not provided with formal case documents. Instead, a friend copied details from a charge sheet by hand, a practice rights groups say highlights a lack of transparency in Iran’s judicial system.
According to the handwritten notes, accusations against Moaiery include giving interviews to media outlets considered hostile by the authorities and providing photographs to organizations linked to the United States and Israel. Reuters could not independently verify the contents of the charge sheet.
Moaiery said the intelligence wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) raided her home during anti-government protests in January and confiscated her phone, laptop, and other electronic equipment. IRGC officers returned after U.S. air strikes on Iran this year, seizing her belongings again, including her cameras.
"On this occasion, they took everything, including even the cameras I had owned since childhood," Moaiery said. "I was subjected to several interrogations, and eventually my case was referred to Branch 33 of the Security Prosecutor’s Office and subsequently to the Revolutionary Court."
Her work has focused on documenting moments of dissent and the lives of women in Iran. The charges against her include "interviewing with networks hostile to the system" and sending photographs to entities in the United States and Israel that are described as "hostile."
Moaiery stated that she shared photographs showing damage from air strikes in Iran with CNN and appeared in an interview about her reporting in March 2026. She has 10 days to appeal the sentence under the 2025 espionage law.
This is not the first time Moaiery has faced legal repercussions for her work. She previously served two years in Gharchak Prison. In 2022, she spent three months in jail and received an eight-year sentence for covering the nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprisings that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. An amnesty later reduced this sentence, but she reported that the case continued to expose her to questioning.
Reporters Without Borders reports that 16 journalists have been detained in Iran this year. Moaiery's earlier work includes documenting the detentions of women by morality police and a 2017 image of a student protesting economic conditions at Tehran University, which was used by the Trump administration in comments on human rights in Iran.
Despite the prospect of further imprisonment, Moaiery expressed her continued commitment to her work. "None of these sentences, however, has ever caused me to abandon my path, even for a moment. I have continued to document and show the realities of Iranian society," she said. "I don’t have anything to lose. The regime took everything from me and the only thing that I still have is my truth and honesty as an observer."