September 4, 2018 | The Weekly Standard

U.S. Should Sanction Judge of Iran’s Brutal Kangaroo Court

The torture still occupies her nightmares.

In 1984, high school student Mahnaz Ghezellou found herself blindfolded and handcuffed in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison for her peaceful activism against the clerical regime. An interrogation began. When she didn’t answer the questions, she recalled in a 2017 interview, a man “kicked my right leg with his boot. My foot still does not work right. Then he hit my palms with an iron rod so hard that three of my fingers were dislocated.”

Today, that man serves as one of Iran’s most infamous—and harshest—judges.

He is Mohammad Moghiseh, the head of Branch 28 of Iran’s Revolutionary Court, which functions primarily to prosecute Tehran’s ideological opponents. According to United for Iran, a San Francisco-based human rights group, Moghiseh has imposed sentences on more than 250 Iranians simply for criticizing the regime, using social media, or belonging to a religious minority, among other putative crimes. But while the European Union sanctioned Moghiseh in 2011 for his malign conduct, Washington has yet to follow suit. It should.

Moghiseh constitutes one of a handful of judicial appointees widely known in Iran as “hanging judges.” In his courtroom, defendants routinely receive death sentences and lengthy prison terms, often on the basis of forced confessions. Trials frequently last minutes. Spurious charges of espionage and moharebeh, or waging war against God, proliferate. Access to a lawyer often remains limited or forbidden. Moghiseh habitually serves as prosecutor as well as judge, undercutting any pretense that his court serves as an independent check on the executive branch.

Moghiseh’s incarceration of lawyers representing political prisoners also underscores his contempt for the rule of law. In June, Tehran once again arrested renowned human rights attorney Nasrin Sotoudehon on the pretext that Moghiseh had sentenced her in absentia to a five-year jail sentence on the charge of espionage. “I realized that they had arrested me for my work on human rights, the defense of women’s rights activists and the fight against the death penalty,” Sotoudeh wrote in a letter from prison in July. “Still, I will not be silenced.”

First imprisoned from 2010 to 2013 for her work on behalf of dissidents, Sotoudeh has received international acclaim for defending Iranian journalists, artists, political activists, protesters, and minors sentenced to death. In recent months, Sotoudeh drew the regime’s ire for vocally defending women who refused, as part of nationwide demonstrations, to wear the mandatory hijab, or headscarf. After her latest detention, the Trump administration called for Sotoudeh’s release, but to no avail.

Moghiseh has developed particular notoriety for his harsh sentences against members of the Bahai faith, whom Tehran refuses to recognize as a protected religious minority. In 2010, the judge sentenced seven Bahai leaders to 20 years in prison each on spurious charges that included espionage. At the trial, one of their lawyers told Moghiseh that he seemed more eager than the prosecutor to punish his clients. An appeals court later reduced their sentences to 10 years each. Scores of rank-and-file Bahai, which the United Nations has described as Iran’s “most severely persecuted religious minority,” have received protracted prison terms as well.

Activists for an independent Kurdistan and members of Iran’s long-repressed Sunni minority have experienced similar fates. In 2014, Moghiseh sentenced four Sunni Kurds to death on charges of moharebeh and “acting against national security by supporting opposition Kurdish parties.” “They were not even given the right to defend themselves in court,” said a family member of one of the victims. “After their trial, Judge Moghisseh told them to ‘be quiet! You are Sunni dogs who must be hanged!’”

Moghiseh has even targeted a U.S. citizen. In 2008, he sentenced Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi to eight years in prison on the charge of committing espionage for the United States. Facing intense U.S. and international pressure, however, an Iranian appeals court released her after three months in prison. As a matter of policy, Iran refuses to recognize dual nationalities, and often regards Iranians with citizenship in another country as potential spies.

Moghiseh also regards speech critical of the regime, or inconsistent with its Islamist values, as worthy of punishment. In the aftermath of mass demonstrations triggered by the 2009 disputed presidential elections, Moghiseh sentenced several Iranians to death, while numerous others received prolonged prison terms. In 2014, Moghiseh sentencedeight Facebook users to a combined total of 123 years in jail for “propaganda against the state” and “blasphemy,” among other charges. In 2015, after a trial that lasted only minutes, Moghiseh sentenced a filmmaker and two musicians to six years in prison for their work. An appeals court later reduced their sentences to three years.

“What we saw in our numerous meetings with him,” said a lawyer who represented several 2009 protesters, “is that he is incapable of understanding the simplest judicial concepts and only serves as a signature machine for heavy and baseless sentences. No honest judge would ever confirm his rulings.” Moghiseh and other judges, he added, have effectively transformed the judiciary into a subsidiary of Iran’s repressive Intelligence Ministry, which retains a long history of violently neutralizing ideological opponents of the regime both at home and abroad.

Moghiseh’s resume makes him ideally suited for his current position. Before arriving at the Revolutionary Court in the early 2000s, he held supervisory and prosecutorial roles at three of Iran’s brutal prisons, where political dissidents often languished and endured torture. As Mahnaz Ghezellou recalled, after her ruthless interrogation with Moghiseh, several guards whipped her with cables in another room.

More ominously, in 1988, Moghiseh played a key role in facilitating nationwide, state-engineered Death Committees that collectively massacred thousands of political opponents. According to a 2011 report compiling survivor testimonies, several eyewitnesses accused Moghiseh “of actually hanging prisoners and participating in their torture.” Others told stories of Moghiseh “supervising the death sentences and the tortures,” “bringing prisoners before the Death Committees and sometimes making critical remarks about them to the judges,” and “putting prisoners they disliked in the wrong queue for execution.”

The Trump administration should respond accordingly. By sanctioning Moghiseh as part of its larger maximum pressure campaign against Iran, it can make clear that Washington will not relent until Iran becomes, in the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a “normal country” that respects its people’s rights.

Tzvi Kahn is a senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @TzviKahn.

Follow FDD on Twitter @FDDFDD is a Washington-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.