Iranian judicial officials have reportedly set 18 August as the trial date for seven jailed Baha’i leaders, despite one of their lawyers being recently imprisoned and the other out of the country.
Three of the accused have close family members in Australia where the Government and the Federal Parliament have publicly called for the release of the seven leaders and expressed their serious concerns about the situation of the Baha’is in Iran.
The Australian Baha’i Community is alarmed at the continual disregard for due process and has no confidence that any trial will be fair, a spokesperson, Tessa Scrine, said today.
“The leaders have been allowed no access to lawyers, only minimal contact with family members, and they have been refused bail,” she said.
“We saw how Iran’s judges flouted the most basic internationally accepted standards of jurisprudence during the recent trial of the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi,” Ms Scrine said.
“Now the world is watching show trials of people arrested in the post-election turmoil in Iran, also without due process and with ‘confessions’ clearly extracted by torture,” she said.
“This kind of injustice has been inflicted on Iranian Baha’is for more than 25 years.”
Ms Scrine said a previous trial date, 11 July, came and went without any proceedings, so there could be no certainty about what will happen next Tuesday.
“A writ giving 18 August as the trial date was addressed to one of lawyers for the Baha’is, Abdolfattah Soltani, who is a principal of the Tehran-based Defenders of Human Rights Centre. But he has recently been locked up in Evin Prison,” Ms Scrine said.
“It is the height of absurdity to issue a trial notice to a lawyer who himself has been unjustly incarcerated,” she said.
Ms Scrine said the other lawyer for the Baha’is, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi, remains abroad at this time.
“The seven facing trial next week have been imprisoned solely for their religious belief, and they face the most severe punishment if found guilty of the trumped-up charges against them,” she said.
“In the 1980s, other Baha’i leaders were executed after being rounded up in a manner similar to the way in which these seven were arrested last year.”
“We have grave fears about what will happen if the trial proceeds next week,” Ms Scrine said.
“Instead of going on trial, the Baha’is should be immediately released on bail, and, at the very least, be given adequate time for their lawyers to prepare a defence,” she said.
Read the Baha’i World News Service story
Update
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