Who Is Yalda Moaiery? The Iranian Photojournalist Jailed Under A New Espionage Law

Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery has been sentenced to 15 years in prison over her work, including providing interviews and photographs to Western media. The sentence was issued under a 2025 espionage law introduced after the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict. Iran says the law is aimed at combating espionage and cooperation with enemy states.

She was accused of providing interviews and images to Western media, including CNN, as well as organisations linked to the United States or Israel. Iranian authorities treated that work as cooperation with hostile entities.

Why Was Yalda Moaiery Sentenced?

Notably, Moaiery had spent much of her career documenting dissent and the lives of women in Iran. She learned of the sentence on Iran's National Journalist Day. In a post on X, Moaiery wrote, "I got my sentence! 15 years in prison! The rest of it can stay like that!"

She said the IRGC confiscated her phone, laptop and other electronic equipment during the anti-government protests in January. She told Reuters that the officers again raided her house after the US launched air strikes and took the cameras she had been using since childhood.

Moaiery added that she was interrogated several times, and her case was eventually referred to Branch 33 of the Security Prosecutor's Office and, subsequently, to the Revolutionary Court. She was not given formal case documents; instead, a friend copied the chargesheet details by hand.

Those documents state that Moaiery was accused of "interviewing with networks hostile to the system" and sending photographs to entities in the United States and Israel that it describes as "hostile." She has 10 days to appeal under the 2025 espionage law, half the time allowed under previous legislation.

Who Is Iranian Photojournalist Yalda Moaiery?

Moaiery has faced imprisonment in the past because of her journalistic work. She previously spent two years in Gharchak Prison, a facility she had earlier photographed as part of her work.

In 2022, she was jailed for three months and later handed an eight-year sentence for documenting the nationwide "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests that followed the death of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Moaiery has largely dedicated her photography to documenting the experiences of women in Iran. Among her early work was a 2007 photograph capturing women being detained by morality police, showing two of them seated inside white police vans with tears visible on their faces.

A decade later, in 2017, she photographed a student protesting against economic conditions at Tehran University. The photograph showed the woman walking through tear gas with her fist raised. The Trump administration later used the image while commenting on human rights conditions in Iran.