IWAC – Follow-up report on Khosrow Sadeghi Boroujeni, the leftist researcher and journalist; summoned back to prison to continue doing a five year long sentence in Evin Prison previous to the current protests in Iran, in July 2020, and worries have been voiced over his conditions and well-being since the arson incident in Evin Prison and its following crackdown in there; he was eventually released from prison on Feb.11, 2023 following what came to be known as the “judiciary public pardon circular letter” as a result of which, a large number of political prisoners and arrested protestors of Zhina (Mahsa) Movement were released from prison and their cases announced reversed or closed. However, on Apr. 10, 2023, this former political prisoner announced that he had recently received the final result of his de novo trial based on which, the main charge resulting in his over two and a half years of imprisonment is now reversed. “Based on the verdict of the Supreme Court, which was communicated to me and my lawyers on the present day, I was acquitted form the charge of “conspiracy and collusion against national security” (with the initial five year long imprisonment sentence), yet, my actions were deemed to constitute a case of “propaganda against the regime” for which I had received an order of the suspension of persecution by the Court of Appeals. In case that this charge is reaffirmed, I will be sentenced to one year of imprisonment. In fact, whatever they affirmed at the district court and court of appeals, was negated by others in the Supreme Court and my personal share in the middle of all this was two years and a half of my life wasted away in the prison!” Added by Khosrow Sadeghi himself. However, the main question here is the implication of this sentence reversal that made 30 months of a researcher and journalist’s life wither away by the arbitrary and whimsical operations of the ruling political order’s entirely security-natured bureaucracy for the sheer pretext of thinking differently and taking critical positions; such an implication is so horrendous and mortifying indeed, already suggested in thousands of ways, that is, the priority of criminalization to the strict letter of law and irrefutable basic civil rights, meaning that, first, they execute criminalization and case-fabrication against the individual with the most basic legal and juridical/civil rights evaded thoroughly, making a short circuit between legal proceeding and punishment, and it is only afterwards that such criminalization is reassessed and evaluated through legal and juridical tracts; to put it simply, first, the individual is punished, and then it is clarified whether this punishment can be held in the eyes of legal and juridical principles, while the human costs pertinent to this causal upturned-ness and distorted anachronism taking place between the issuance of a sentence and the belated legal assessment of it, should be solely paid by the victimized individual herself helplessly left in a captivate net of security-minded case-fabrication; it is a regular phenomenon simply stemming out of the absolute irresponsiveness of the dominated order with a judicial façade (law-oriented in appearance) but security-minded (extra-legal by nature); this problem extends way beyond the case of Khosrow Sadeghi Boroujeni, and finds its utmost devastating examples in the two-year long “temporary arrest” of certain environmentalists such as Morad Tahbaz, Niloufar Bayani, Hooman Jowkar, Taher Ghadiriyan, Sam Rajabi, Sepideh Kashani, Amir Hussein Khaleghi Hamidi, and Abdolreza Kouhpayeh (not to mention the state-murder of the prominent environmentalist lecturer and activist, Seyyed Kavous Emami in prison over the same case), and the hastily effectuated, lynching-style, and practically begrudging executions of a number of the arrested protestors in the course of Zhina (Mahsa) Movement such as Mohsen Shekari, Majid’Reza Rahnavard, Muhammad Mehdi Karami, and Seyyed Muhammad Husseini, or the other infamous “temporary arrest” of Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Muhammadi, the journalists who covered the story of the brutal death and funeral of Mahsa Amini herself, which has been going on for over 200 days now.
