Iranian detainees convicted based on "flimsy" evidence

A number of Iranian post-election detainees are being convicted and sentenced based on such "flimsy" evidence as “a green ribbon or bracelet,” announced a defence attorney for several of these cases.

Green is the colour that has become associated with the post-election protests and the reform movement which has been going on in Iran in the past ten months following the alleged fraud that brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back to another term of presidency.

The defence attorney has told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran: “The files of the post-election detainees are being processed behind the scene and the media and even the attorneys have very little access to the files.”

The defence attorney, who has not been identified, maintains that if it is revealed how prisoners are being sentenced to prison terms between six months to five years over such “flimsy” evidence, the judiciary would become “a joke and suffer great damage to its reputation.”

In the past ten months over five thousand people have arrested in connections with election protests and many have been handed heavy sentences that even include execution.

Reportedly pictures taken by cell phones from street gatherings are also used as evidence to back such sentences.

The Iranian defence attorney maintains that “taking photographs of public spaces with hundreds of people in them is not considered a crime and people are not supposed to be arrested for such a thing.”

He expressed great concern over the judges’ “lack of attention” to the law and added: “In all of the trials that I have attended, the judges have shown no interest in the defence arguments presented to them.”

He goes on to report that the charges introduced by “the prosecutor, officials of the Ministry of Intelligence and interrogators of the Revolutionary Guards” are usually taken as the “last word” in the trials of the post-election detainees.

Last week, Ali Younesi, former Iranian Intelligence Minister also condemned the interference of security forces in the activities of the judiciary.

In the past months, a number of dissidents have been arrested by the Revolutionary Guards and the Security forces and kept in prisons run by these institutions.