(April 20, 2008) The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran is appealing to the head of Iran’s Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, to review the sentencing by an appeals court of three students, Ehsan Mansouri, Majid Tavakoli and Ahmad Ghasaban to prison terms. The students’ lawyer, Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, has appealed to the Judiciary to review the sentencing in light of complete lack of evidence in issuing the sentence. The Campaign deeply regrets the decision, not only because three clearly innocent young people have been unfairly condemned after torture and ill-treatment, but because it demonstrates the vulnerability of the Iranian people to the whims and prejudices of a system lacking accountability, transparency, and fairness.
“This miscarriage of justice case is a disgrace to Iran because the appeal process violated Iranian law and international standards. The case needs to be reviewed at the highest level by a committee of independent judges,” the Campaign stated.
On 15 April 2008, an appeals court sentenced the three students from Teheran’s elite Amir Kabir University to prison terms of about two years each on charges of having spread anti-Islamic images and propaganda against the state. The charges against the students were initially dropped by the lower court in the absence of the presentation of sufficient factual evidence supporting the charges by the prosecutors.
Confessions, which had been extracted under severe torture, were subsequently retracted by the three young men. The appeals court decision was not based on the presentation of any evidence. The lawyer for the students stated, “These students were sentenced without any reason.”
The case has been a matter of serious concern for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, which included the accused students among the Prisoners of Conscience it has tried to support (www.iranhumanrights.org/en/themes/profiles/). The sentence deserves to be condemned in the strongest terms by all governments, intergovernmental organizations, and civil society groups that uphold international human rights standards and standards for fair and responsible trials.
“Indeed, what transpired was not a legitimate trial at all, but rather an officially sanctioned attempt to destroy the reputations and future of three promising young people by crudely manipulating the courts. The judicial system itself is a victim in this case. It has been ruthlessly exploited to accommodate blatantly political and subjective motives; rules of procedure, facts, evidence, logic, and the law itself have been ignored,” the Campaign stated.
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.
