A labor activist has had her sentenced reduced by the court of appeals after she and her family faced 10 months of lies and contradictory statements from authorities. Announcing the verdict, the judiciary said it had shown lenience in dealing with the activist.

On Tuesday, February 18, Judiciary Spokesman Gholam Hossein Esmaili announced that the prison sentence for labor activist Neda Naji, who has been under arrest for nearly 10 months, has been cut to half by the court of appeals. The lower Revolutionary Court had sentenced Naji to five years and six months in prison on December 4, 2019, and the appeals court reduced it to 30 months.

According to Esmaili, the reduction in Naji’s sentence is an example of the judiciary’s policy of “leniency” [Persian link]. But is it? IranWire reviews what Neda Naji and her family have gone through since she was arrested on May Day of last year, and assesses whether the claim of “leniency” by the judiciary spokesman holds up.

Made for TV, not for Court

“Neda’s case is all ‘leniency’ and ‘rule of law’!” says a friend of Neda Naji, whom I will refer to as “Simin Sadr,” an alias, to protect her. “In the presence of her mother and husband, the examining magistrate promised that if Neda did not object to her arrest warrant he would set bail for her release, but when Neda certified that she was not objecting he reneged on his promise. But more ridiculous was that they told Neda’s mother to go Branch 36 of the Revolutionary Court and tell them that by the order of Ebrahim Raeesi [head of the judiciary] bail must be set for arrested workers. The official at the branch told her that this order by Mr. Raeesi was for television, not for their branch.”

Neda Naji was arrested at an International Worker’s Day rally outside the Iranian parliament on May 1, 2019. She was taken to the notorious Gharchak Prison near Tehran, was subjected to insults and obscenities by interrogators, and was physically assaulted. She remained in detention for 294 days until February 19, when Esmaili announced the final verdict against her. Naji will remain in detention until the judge responsible for carrying out the sentence informs her lawyer and the prison of the verdict.

Neda Naji was born in Tehran in 1989. She is a law graduate, a labor and women’s rights activist and an advocate of rights for street children. In recent years, as a volunteer teacher, she worked with the Society for Defending Street and Labor Children and provided basic education for these children. According to Simin Sadr, she was hardworking but had no fixed job. “Neda had studied chemistry and has a law degree,” she says, “but like many other educated people in Iran she was practically unemployed and, as she herself puts it, suffered from job instability.”

Before her most recent troubles, Neda Naji had been summoned to the intelligence ministry during the Green Movement protests in the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election. She also had a few brushes with the university’s security department when she was a student, but she had never been arrested before and her family and friends assumed her detention would not last long. “Everybody expected that Neda, Marzieh [Amiri, a journalist] and Atefeh [Rangriz, also a labor activist] would be released on bail after interrogations but they kept them for a long time and Neda was never released,” says Simin.

Neda Naji and many others were arrested at a rally outside the Iranian parliament to mark International Worker’s Day on May 1, 2019. Most of the detainees were released on bail a few days or even weeks later but a number of them, including Neda Naji, remained in jail. When, in October 2019, Marzieh Amiri and Atefeh Rangriz were released on bail, Naji became the only one of the May 1st detainees to remain in detention, while some of the detainees had served their sentences and were free by that time.

Eligible for Bail…But not!

Neda Naji and other women who were arrested on Wednesday, May 1st, were first taken to the detention center of the Security Police in Tehran’s Vozara Street. They spent the night at the detention center and on Thursday morning, after the courthouse at Evin Prison agreed that they were eligible for release on bail, Naji and four other women were transferred to Gharchak Prison in Varamin, located in a desert on the outskirts of Tehran. According to Simin, on the same day, authorities told the families, who had gone to Evin courthouse to find out about the prisoners, that they were eligible for release on bail. However, the intelligence ministry then intervened and the bail order was rescinded.

The intelligence ministry was against the release of Neda Naji, Marzieh Amiri and Atefeh Rangriz and the court’s bail order was withdrawn an hour after it was issued and before the families could go to Gharchak Prison to start the bail process. The families, however, “were still hopeful that their children would be released,” says Simin. “Every day Neda called her family from Gharchak and they were waiting for the bail to be set, but on Sunday, May 5, they returned these three from Gharchak to Evin Prison’s Ward 209 and issued a 12-day arrest warrant for them. On the same day, Neda called home from Ward 209 and told her family that she had been transferred there.”

After their 12-day detention warrant expired, Marzieh Amiri and Neda Naji were taken to the examining magistrate at Evin Courthouse, which renewed their detention warrant for another month. A bail order was issued for Atefeh Rangriz but then authorities brought new charges against her and refused to release her.

Standing Up to Abuse

During the interrogations, whenever the interrogator subjected her to foul language, Neda Naji wrote on the interrogation form that she refused to answer the question because of the insults. This defiance led to the interrogation period being extended and the interrogators to abuse her with more intensity. “Neda’s interrogation took 42 days while, as far as I know, the interrogation of others was completed in less than 30 days,” says Simin. “Then the interrogator took revenge on Neda by not sending the interrogation records to the examining magistrate on time.” This was one reason why no bail was set for Neda, she says, “because they did not send the case to the examining magistrate until two months after the interrogations were completed. “They used this delay as an excuse to renew Neda’s detention order.”

According to Simin Sadr, one of the examples authorities gave of their “leniency” toward Neda Naji was a bogus charges that the interrogator and the examining magistrate brought against her: “Neda was charged with ‘assembly and collusion against national security’ and ‘disrupting public order’ and, as evidence, they cited her participation in a protest by the students of Tehran University against new hijab regulations. But this protest took place on May 14 at Tehran University’s compound — when Neda was in solitary confinement at Evin’s Ward 209 and was being interrogated.”

Of the 42 days that Neda was under interrogation at Ward 209, she was in solitary confinement for at least 26 days and for the rest of the days she was kept in a two-inmate cell. During the interrogation period, Neda was allowed one short phone call to her mother and, on May 23, 23 days after their arrest, Neda Naji and her codefendants Marzieh Amiri and Atefeh Rangriz were permitted to meet their families for the first time in a so-called “cabin” meeting, where the inmate is separated from her visitors by a glass partition.

When the interrogations were over, Neda Naji was transferred to the quarantine ward of Gharchak Prison on Saturday, June 15. She was allowed to call her mother and tell her about having been returned to Gharchak. In that prison, she shared a cell with Atefeh Rangriz, who had been transferred from Evin before her, and Sepideh Gholian, another labor activist who was arrested after she took part in protest rallies by Haft-Tappeh Sugarcane Factory workers in Khuzestan province.

Lies, Lies and Promises

On July 8, 2019, Neda Naji was taken from Gharchak to Evin Courthouse to present her final defense. The examining magistrate renewed her detention order and this time Neda entered her objection to the warrant. Simin Sadr says that this was another example of “leniency” by the judiciary: “The examining magistrate called Neda’s mother and husband into his office and told them that ‘if Neda objects to the arrest warrant then the case has to be sent back and it will take longer, but if she writes right now that she does not object I promise that I will set the bail right before your eyes.’ After some talk, he gained their trust and Neda wrote that she was not objecting. After some bargaining with the family, the magistrate agreed to set a bail of 500 million tomans [close to $120,000 at the official exchange rate]. He promised that he would issue the bail order by the next day so that Neda would be released but, of course, this never happened.”

The next day, and for the next few consecutive days, Naji’s family went to Evin Courthouse with a certified property bond to post bail but the examining magistrate did not even allow them to enter the courthouse. “Later, after Neda’s lawyer saw her case file, he told the family that the file had her signature waiving an objection to the detention order but no bail had been set,” says Simin. “Everything that the magistrate had told Neda and her family had been a lie. He had deceived them.”

During the 54 days that Neda Naji was in Gharchak Prison she was allowed to make regular phone calls to her family. According to Simin Sadr, one of the peculiarities of Gharchak Prison is how the so-called “contact” visitations work: “In Gharchak, cabin visits can happen once a week but contact visitations are allowed only once a month, during which a female prison agent sits on the table next to the inmate and the family. As Sepideh Gholian puts it, it is a contact visitation between the agent and the family.”

Beaten in Prison

Since female dervishes were transferred to Gharchak, female political prisoners in that prison no longer wear chadors when visiting various parts of the prison such as the clinic. Despite this, a guard once slapped Naji for refusing to wear a chador. “The guard asked Neda why she was not wearing a chador,” says Simin. “Neda answered that the chief warden had agreed that political prisoners do not have to wear chadors. In response to her reply, the guard slapped Neda so hard that she could not see clearly for a few hours.”

In another instance, according to Simin Sadr, ordinary inmates attacked Neda Naji and a number of other political prisoners at the instigation of the guards.

On August 7, Neda Naji was finally transferred from Gharchak to Evin’s women’s ward, where she is still detained. At Evin, Naji, like other female inmates, is allowed two cabin and two contact meetings with her family per month. On Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays she is allowed to have a 10-minute phone conversation with her family. But, says Simin, another apparent proof of the judiciary’s “leniency” is that the rights of both phone calls and meetings are liable to be suspended for a week or even a number of weeks for various excuses and, in the last few months, some female prisoners at Evin have been subjected to this treatment.

Neda Naji’s trial was held on Wednesday, November 13 at Branch 28 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, with Mohammad Moghiseh presiding as the judge. According to Simin Sadr, the long delay in Naji’s trial being heard at the lower court was partly due to the fact that Judge Moghiseh was absent from the bench for a month in protest against an admonition by the judiciary chief that arrested workers must be given lighter sentences. He refused to schedule any trials and then used the excuse of a pilgrimage to the Shia holy city of Karbala in Iraq to be absent for yet another month.

However, says Simin, besides the long delay to the trial, another manifestation of the judiciary’s “leniency” was how the trial itself was conducted: “They said that it was going to be a public trial but except for Zahra Minuei and Mostafa Nili, the lawyers, nobody was admitted to the courtroom. Ms. Mehraneh Ghasemi, Neda’s mother, got herself to the door of the court but she was prevented from entering. Jamal Ameli, Neda’s husband, was not even allowed into the building and Neda was brought to the courtroom in a way that meant they did not cross paths.”

Neda Naji was tried on charges of “assembly and collusion against national security,” “disrupting public order” and “insulting government agents in the course of performing their duties.” According to Simin Sadr, Neda Naji had pleaded guilty to the last charge: “In one of the days that Neda was under interrogation at Ward 209 and while she was returning to her cell after the interrogation, she shouted at the guard who was accompanying her to ‘shut up!’ after the guard shoved her and shouted at her. During the questioning by the examining magistrate, Neda accepted the charge and wrote it down.”

“Let’s Forget About it!”

On December 4, 2019, the lower court sentenced Neda Naji to five years and six months in prison. “The lower court acquitted Neda from the charges of ‘propaganda against the regime’ and ‘disrupting public order’ but she was sentenced to five years in prison for ‘assembly and collusion against national security’ and to an additional six months for insulting a government agent,” says Simin. “But during the trial something interesting happened. Judge Moghiseh told Neda, ‘I have a picture here that shows you were in the rally without your hijab!’ When Neda denied this, the judge showed her the picture. ‘My head is covered with a black shawl and my hair is black, too,’ said Neda. Judge Moghiseh looked carefully at the picture again and said ‘Yeah, you are right. Let’s forget about it!’”

After her lawyers filed an appeal, Neda’s case was sent to Branch 36 of the Revolutionary Court of Appeals under Judge Seyed Ahmad Zargar. According to the law, in cases where the prison sentence is longer than six months, the appeals court must hold a trial with the defendant and the lawyers present, and Neda Naji’s lawyers were confident that this would happen but, according to Simin Sadr, once again Neda was subjected to the judiciary’s so-called “leniency”: “Not only was no trial held, the lawyers and the family were not even allowed to meet the judge or any court officials. The judge issued his verdict without holding a trial.”

Naji’s mother once succeeded in entering the offices of Branch 36 by giving an excuse, but the officials there told her that she had no standing in the case and if she did not leave they would throw her out. “Ms. Ghasemi told them that she was Neda’s mother and she was there to ask for bail to be set for her daughter,” says Simin. “Then she sat down, waiting for the judge to see her. They got rid of her by telling her to send Neda’s lawyer to the court the next day and saying they would do something about it. The next day Neda’s lawyer went to the court and, at the door, asked to be let upstairs to go to the office. But the office told the lawyer on the phone that ‘her mother was too noisy and we wanted to get rid of her so we told her to send you but there is nothing for you here.’ They lawyer was not even allowed to go to the office.”

The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Right Hand is Doing

Around the same time, a person from the judiciary called Naji’s mother Mehraneh Ghasemi and asked her why no bail has been set for her daughter. She told him, “they don’t let us in to see the judge and we can get no answers from them, either.” He told her, ‘go to the court and tell them that Ebrahim Raeesi has ordered that bail must be set for arrested workers and then let me know what answer they give you.”

Neda Naji’s mother went back to Branch 36 and gave them the message. “The branch supervisor or whoever was sitting there told Neda’s mother: ‘Mr. Raeesi’s order is for television, not for our branch,’” says Simin. “Neda’s family relayed this response to the judiciary official who had called them but they heard nothing back.”

Even though Neda Naji’s friends and family believe that even a one-day prison sentence for her is unjust and unlawful, the verdict by the court of appeals has pleased the family to a certain degree. “The sentence has been reduced by half, meaning that she now has to serve 30 months and she has already served close to 10 months,” says Simin. “But the verdict was difficult as well because it was final and there is no longer any chance whatsoever that Neda will be released on bail. To see Neda again, her family, her mother, her husband and, most important, her pupils at the school for street children and child laborers, must wait another 20 months.”

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International Trade Union Federation Calls on Iran to Release Activists, 15 November 2019

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Imprisoned Activist Speaks Out for All Women Prisoners, 23 September 2019

110 Years in Prison for 7 Labor Activists, 8 September 2019

The Tangled Web of Political and Security Charges against Journalists and Labor Activists, 24 May 2019

Workers Beaten and Arrested at May Day Parade, 1 May 2019