The son of an Iranian opposition leader who has been under house arrest since 2011 has himself been sentenced to six months in prison on charges of distributing anti-government propaganda, Radio Free Europe reported Tuesday.

Green Movement leader Mehdi Karroubi ran as a reformist presidential candidate in 2009 against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was re-elected in what was widely considered to be a fraudulent vote. Karroubi was put under house arrest two years later. He wrote a letter last year to current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani demanding a public trial, which his son Hossein Karroubi emailed to a brother in London, who published and disseminated it. It was sending this email that led the younger Karroubi to be charged.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last month that talk of a “national reconciliation” involving freeing opposition leaders was “meaningless.”

“People will not reconcile with those who beat up the Basiji on Ashura,” Khamenei said, referring to protests led by the Green Movement during the Ashura holiday. Contrary to Khamenei’s accusation that the protesters instigated violence, the Los Angeles Times observed that “news reports at the time suggested that it was the demonstrators, of whom several were killed and hundreds arrested, who bore the brunt of the violence.”

Rouhani, who has often been portrayed in international media as a moderate, promised during his 2013 election campaign to fre Karroubi and other opposition leaders, but so far has not fulfilled his promise. During his tenure as president, executions in Iran increased each successive year, reaching a total of 966 in 2015, the highest total in a decade.

A surge of executions in August prompted the United Nations’s official investigator of Iran’s human rights record to criticize the Islamic Republic for its “complete disregard of its obligations under international human rights law and especially of international fair trial standards and due process guarantees.”

[Photo:  Mardetanha / WikiCommons ]