Iranians get 15-minute plea before execution
Human rights groups say demonstrators are blocked from choosing a lawyer and stripped of basic rights
Iran is giving demonstrators as little as 15 minutes to defend themselves in court before sentencing them to death, it has emerged. Iranian human rights groups said the tactic, which has previously been used for critics of the Islamic regime, is now being used against about 100 demonstrators in sham trials. The BBC Persian service revealed that Mohammad Mehdi Karami, a defendant, was given only 15 minutes to defend himself in court. He was found guilty and executed.
IRAN is giving demonstrators as little as 15 minutes to defend themselves in court before sentencing them to death, it has emerged.
Iranian human rights groups said the cruel tactic, which was applied to Kurdish activists and other critics of the Islamic regime during previous crises, is now being used against around a hundred demonstrators in sham trials.
It came as the BBC Persian service revealed that one defendant, Mohammad Mehdi Karami, was given only 15 minutes to defend himself in court. Karami, a 22-year-old karate champion, was then sentenced to death and hanged within days.
He had been banned from choosing his own lawyer and was instead provided with one who failed to challenge the basic facts of the case against him.
“The practice is widespread. This is how the Revolutionary Courts work,” Mahmood Amiry-moghaddam, the director of the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights, said.
“We are not talking about due process. These trials are only formalities... it is, unfortunately, not a new phenomenon,” he said.
He cited a 2008 case where Kurdish activists were sentenced to death after a trial of only seven minutes as one example of the practice.
Raha Bahreini, an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, said: “We’ve documented hundreds if not thousands of cases where people are sent to their deaths after trials that lasted a few minutes, and where defendants were not provided with basic fair trial rights.”
At least four Iranians have been executed for their role in the massive and ongoing protests in Iran, which began after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was beaten to death while in Iranian police custody after she was detained by the morality police for incorrectly wearing her hijab.
The swift and merciless trials, including the one involving Mr Karami, appear to be intended as a deterrent to young Iranians.
He was arrested over the murder of an Iranian security officer and charged with “corruption on earth”, the offence
‘We are not talking about due process. These trials are only formalities’
which has been used to justify death sentences for protesters.
When he went on trial on Nov 30, along with 16 other defendants, he was forbidden from choosing his own legal representative. Instead, the court appointed him a lawyer from a regimeapproved list.
That advocate did not challenge the key facts of the case and only asked judges to offer his client “forgiveness”.
Video footage of the trial, which was heavily edited by the regime before its release, shows Mr Karami looking visibly distressed. At a later hearing on Dec 5 he was sentenced to death and then hanged two days later.
Iran has also hanged a British-iranian citizen, Alireza Akbari, on charges of acting as a spy for MI6 inside Iran, accusations that he strongly denied before his death. Akbari was allegedly subjected to repeated rounds of torture before issuing a video confession.
Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, condemned the execution as “callous and cowardly” and said he would temporarily recall the British ambassador to Tehran. Britain is also drawing up plans to proscribe the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation.
In stark contrast to the draconian sentences for protesters, an Iranian man has been jailed for just eight years after decapitating his wife and displaying her head in public, the judiciary announced yesterday.
Mona Heidari, 17, was killed in February 2022 by her husband and brotherin-law in Ahvaz, in the south-western Khuzestan province.
Video footage later emerged of her smiling husband parading her decapitated head in the street, triggering an outpouring of grief and outrage.