Narges Mohammadi: I Will Not Participate in Any Staged or Dictated Trials

Narges Mohammadi has denounced her charges as “baseless and false” and announced that she will not appear in any court to defend herself. She has described the judicial proceedings as “a clear violation of the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as a violation of her own human rights.”

Narges Mohammadi has formally notified the Zanjan prosecutor and the Tehran prosecutor that she will not appear in any court for her defense, as she considers their procedures “a clear violation of the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as a violation of her own human rights and prosecutable.”

According to a report from the “Human Rights Defenders Center,” the prosecutor of Branch 2 of the Zanjan Court of Justice visited the women’s ward of Zanjan Prison on April 6 to obtain the final defense statement from Ms. Mohammadi, but the prisoner refused to cooperate with the “staged and dictated court.”

Narges Mohammadi stated that “so far I have been sentenced to 23 years in prison in three branches of the Court of Appeal of the Islamic Revolution.” She added: “I hereby announce that I will not appear in the dictated and staged courts of the judiciary, and I accept all my activities within Evin Prison, holding sessions, taking positions and issuing statements that I have made from prison over the years, and I will bear the cost of these actions in this exile and under the inhumane conditions imposed on me, and I consider the actions of the Ministry of Intelligence under Mr. Rouhani and the management of Evin Prison and the prison organization to be biased, illegal and contrary to human ethics, and I will not remain silent in the face of it.”

According to the Human Rights Defenders Center, Narges Mohammadi’s departure from the women’s ward of Zanjan Prison is prohibited even with the presence of security forces and under custody, so that the judicial and administrative procedures that should take place in the prosecutor’s branches are being carried out by sending prosecutors and judicial officials to the women’s ward and inside the prison.

Following Narges Mohammadi’s transfer to Zanjan Prison, six new charges in two cases were brought against her in December 2019.

Security officials have described the two new cases as related to incidents during her imprisonment. The Zanjan prosecutor’s office has cited “dissemination of political statements, holding educational classes and a protest sit-in in the women’s ward” as the basis for the new charges.

The prosecutor has announced that both cases belong to Tehran and the task of obtaining the final defense has been delegated to the Zanjan Court of Justice.

“Tyrannical Imprisonment”

Narges Mohammadi, vice president and spokesperson of the Human Rights Defenders Center, who has been imprisoned since June 5, 2015, was previously sentenced to 16 years in prison on three charges.

Following Ms. Mohammadi’s protest sit-in at Evin Prison in solidarity with nationwide protests in November 2019, she was transferred to Zanjan Prison in January 2020, and additional charges against her were raised in two new cases.

The reason for this transfer was Ms. Mohammadi’s sit-in and several other prisoners in solidarity with the victims of floods and earthquakes and the November protests at the Evin Prison office. Evin officials banned the sit-in participants from visits and deprived them of the right to telephone contact with their relatives.

In a letter she published on the anniversary of her imprisonment, Narges Mohammadi spoke of “tyrannical imprisonment among victims of poverty, corruption and patriarchal laws.”

Narges Mohammadi, a mother of two, suffers from pulmonary embolism and muscular paralysis, and has been deprived of telephone contact with her children for several months.

Prior to the release of the letter, Ms. Mohammadi’s lawyer announced that her conditional release had been rejected and that she was being held alongside dangerous prisoners in violation of the principle of separation of crimes.

Azardokht Bazargan, Narges Mohammadi’s mother, in a letter to the head of the judiciary, while criticizing the inhumane conditions in Zanjan Prison, said: “My daughter contracted multiple diseases in solitary cells and in the past 5 years of imprisonment, she has undergone three major surgeries and during these years she has only had one three-day furlough.”

Source: DW