Iranian Poets Face lashes For Shaking Hands With Opposite Sex?

                             Fatemeh Ekhtesari, left, and Mehdi Musavi right

Two Iranian poets are facing 99 lashes each for shaking hands with people of the opposite sex in one of the latest examples of harsh punishments meted out against writers

and artists by Iran's judiciary, according to human rights advocates.

The poets, Fatemeh Ekhtesari and Mehdi Musavi, have also both been sentenced to years in prison for "insulting the sacred" in their writings, a decision slammed by freedom of expression activists.

"Ekhtesari and Musavi's arrests and convictions are a travesty of justice, and send a chill over the already beleaguered creative community in Iran," Karin Deutsch Karlekar, director of Free Expression Programs at PEN American Center, said in a statement earlier this month.

Their cases highlight the contrast between the moderate image projected abroad by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the hardline approach to human rights pursued by authorities inside Iran.

Many Americans are familiar with Iran's detention of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who's been kept behind bars for more than a year on espionage charges. The newspaper denounced a recent court decision to convict Rezaian, who holds dual Iranian and American citizenship, as "an outrageous injustice."

But other Iranian writers who are less well known in the West have fallen foul of Iranian authorities, according to rights groups.

Earlier this month, Ekhtesari and Musavi, who touched on social issues in their work, received prison sentences of 11½ and 9 years respectively for convictions based on confessions extracted under duress, according to PEN. Both poets legally published books that received approval from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, the group said.

The flogging sentences came after Ekhtesari admitted to shaking hands with male participants at a poetry event in Sweden, PEN said. Shaking hands with a member of the opposite sex who isn't an immediate relation is considered an "illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery" in Iran, it said.

A spokesman for the Iranian judiciary declined to comment on the poets' cases, which haven't been covered in the country's state media.