Earlier this Tuesday, October 26, the court granted bail to Amir Hossein Moradi, who was arrested in relation to the nationwide protests of November 2019.
According to HRANA, the news agency of Human Rights Activists, Moradi is currently hospitalized for a skin disease. Based on this court order, if he pays the required 4 billion tomans bail, he will be set free upon being discharged from the hospital. This has been confirmed on the personal social media page of Babak Pak-Nia, Moradi’s lawyer.
Amir Hossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi, and Mohammad Rajabi were sentenced to death by the Tehran Revolutionary Court, before a global outcry led to the re-examination of their case.
On Jun 24, 2020, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) announced that the death sentence of the three political prisoners had been upheld by the Supreme Court. On July 14, 2020, the spokesman of the Judiciary officially announced the confirmation of their death sentences and said that the sentences had been sent to the prosecutor’s office for execution.
However, according to the lawyers, permission to enter the trial and study the case was given to them on July 15, 2020–weeks after HRANA reported that the death sentence had been confirmed in the Supreme Court.
Less than an hour after the official confirmation of the death sentences for Amir Hossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi, and Mohammad Rajabi, “#Don’t_execute” became the world’s top trend with hundreds of thousands of tweets. Human Rights Watch, US President Donald Trump, the Writers’ Association of Iran, and others all reacted to this news. The hashtag has now been used more than ten million times.
The following day, UN human rights experts issued a statement and condemned the death sentences. The statement expressed that Amir Hossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi, and Mohammad Rajabi were tortured and forced to confess and that these forced confessions were later used against them in their trials. HRANA has previously conducted numerous conversations with informed sources and extensive research to determine what happened to the prisoners in the various processes of activity up to the conviction.
On July 19, 2020, the three defendants’ lawyers issued a joint statement announcing that the case had been referred to a different branch for retrial after the Supreme Court’s acceptance of Article 477.
In mid-December of 2020, in the aftermath of the global outcry, the young activists’ request for a retrial was finally accepted by Branch 1 of the Supreme Court and their death sentences were finally overturned.
The retrial process since has been comparably unstructured. The cases were submitted to Branch 23 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran for retrial following overturn of their death sentnece, but, due to turnover in the head of the branch, the court session was postponed to May 12. Once again, the court session was cancelled due to the absence of the second judge. In July, their court session was postponed for a fourth time.
Moradi’s release would mark a rare victory in the ongoing legal battle facing so many of those who were involved in the nationwide protests of November 2019.
