Iran Focus
London, 8 Dec – The Iranian Regime’s judicial system is not unlike that of the science fiction movie Minority Report, according to human rights activist Arash Sobhani at The Huffington Post.
In Minority Report, citizens are arrested because they know about crimes yet to be committed and yet somehow, the Iranian Regime have found a way to one up (or one down) the Steven Spielberg thriller.
Golrokh Ebrahimi, an Iranian woman, wrote a short story opposing the brutal punishment of stoning in Iran and was sent to prison for six years as a result.
The story, which featured a character burning a Quran in protest of the stoning, was never published and kept only on a personal laptop.
How did the authorities find it?
Well in 2014, the authorities broke down the front door of Ebrahimi and her husband Arash Sadeghi, to arrest Sadeghi, search their house and confiscate personal belongings, all sans a warrant.
Then, in October 2016, Ebrahimi was sentenced to six years for what is effectively a thought crime in Iran and a First Amendment Right in the USA.
Sobhani wrote: “That’s 6 years in one of the worst prisons in Iran for only ‘imagining’ a story which remained unpublished on a personal laptop that was illegally confiscated.”
Sadeghi, who is in critical condition having been on hunger strike ever since his wife’s sentencing, is serving 15 years on equally ridiculous charges, like “spreading propaganda against the regime” in a kangaroo court, where he was denied access to his lawyer and his private Facebook messages were presented as evidence of his crimes.
This dispels the myth of a moderate Iranian Regime; the real Regime is one that imprisons people for writing unpublished fiction, crushes those who choose to question the status quo and hides massive corruption.
The Iranian Regime commits countless crimes against their citizens, their neighbouring states and the world in general on a daily basis but they are never tried, never convicted and never have to serve a day in prison.
Sobhani wrote: “Corruption is not the enemy of the Islamic Republic. It’s what makes it stronger. What threatens it is the existence and imagination of people like Golrokh, who as many other Iranians, dare to be human in the supposedly Islamic Republic. The regime masquerades as a legitimate state where the will of the republic is an Islamic regime. Nothing is further from the truth.”
He continued: “For those of us who have experienced it, it is an extremely shrewd version of ISIS that has learned how to suppress efficiently, violently, and silently over the past three decades while convincing the world otherwise. It is the reason why we witness such harsh treatment of Iranians by the regime that goes unnoticed in the rest of the world. At least with ISIS everyone knows where they stand.”
He states that the nuclear deal and its lack of repercussions has only emboldened the Iranian Regime with regards to the mistreatment of their own people and their support for terrorism in Syria, Yemen and further afield.
In order to secure minuscule nuclear safeguards, the West overlooked the non-nuclear threat that Iran poses and the people suffering the most are the ordinary Iranians.
