Despite not having any reliable evidence against students, Saedi, the judge of appeal court, finalized jail sentences for three innocent students of Amirkabir University, Majid Tavakoli, Ehsan Mansoori and Ahmad Ghasaban, under the pressure of intelligence ministry and the prosecutor of Tehran. He also annulled the previous verdict of not guilty by judge Hadad.
Based on the appeal court sentence announced today, the sentence of 3 years of jail for Majid Tavakoli, 2 years and half for Ahamad Ghasaban and 2 years for Ehsan Mansoori passed by revolution court, is finalized, but due to the young age of the accused and having no criminal record; he commuted the sentence to one year and half for Tavakoli, one year and two months for Ghasaban and ten months for Mansoori.
Appeal court sustained the objection from Hasan Zareh Dehnavi, called judge Hadad, and reversed the decision made by public court and sentenced each student to one year of jail due to this dossier. This court also dropped the charges of insulting Basij and security forces by students.
The final sentences are: two years and half for Majid Tavakoli, two years and two months for Ahmad Ghasaban and one year and ten months for Ehsan Mansoori.
What we have said here is only a brief listing of academic violations and denial of right to education in Iranian universities today. Students are determined to continue their legal and rightful struggle to promote independence of universities and uphold academic freedoms, although many are sacrificed down this path.
Iran is a state party to both the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (without reservation) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), both of which prohibit the execution of persons under the age of 18 at the time of their offense. In ratifying the CRC, Iran declared an extremely broad reservation, “not to apply any provisions or articles of the Convention that are incompatible with Islamic Laws.”
one must not forget that one aspect of “security” cases is the image that they carry for the groups that advance such issues. Therefore, before fake charges take to the news-media and become public, those who have had a hand in arresting the students must be weakened. Otherwise, after the severe charges are made public, repeated and are tied to the image of the actors, even the intervention of the head of the judiciary (as history demonstrates) cannot be of much help to the detainees.
How can we tell the judiciary officials of Iran that according to law juveniles can stay alive and continue to live with appropriate and suitable punishment? How must one make this request from the judiciary a public and wide-spread demand and point out that killing a juvenile who has not wholeheartedly committed an act does not solve any of the real problems facing the country?
Thousands of university students in an Iranian city have held a protest against the attempted sexual harassment of a female colleague by a top university official, the press reported on Monday. About 3,000 students at the university in the northwestern city of Zanjan staged the sit-in protest over the weekend at a sports hall on campus, the reports said.
