The lawyer of man on death row over a high-profile protest case said on Monday that Iran’s Supreme Court has yet to respond to six defendants' appeal and the court has declined to meet with families or attorneys.
A lawyer representing Hossein Nemati, one of six defendants sentenced to death, said that courts typically respond within two months but after three official inquiries over nine months there had still been no reply.
“On July 30, we went to the relevant branch along with some of the families, but we were told that neither the lawyers nor the families would be allowed in for this case,” Payam Dorfeshan was quoted as saying by Telegram news channel Emtedad.
The so-called Ekbatan case involves multiple defendants, six of whom face execution after being convicted of killing a member of Iran's domestic enforcement militia in Tehran amid nationwide anti-government protests in 2022.
They deny the charges.
“Our clients have now reached the legal limit of two years in pretrial detention. The law clearly states that pretrial detention cannot exceed two years under any circumstances,” Dorfeshan said.
The six detainees facing execution are Milad Armon, Alireza Bormarzpournak, Amir Mohammad Khosheghbal, Alireza Kafaei, Navid Najaran and Hossein Nemati.
On October 26, 2022, during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Basij militia, Arman Alivardi, was injured in a building complex in Tehran called Shahrak-e Ekbatan and died two days later.
Following Alivardi’s death, security forces conducted mass arrests of more than 50 young residents of the complex and indictments were issued against several of them.
On July 29, Amnesty International warned that Armon, Bormarzpournak, Khosheghbal, Kafaei, Najaran and Nemati are at risk of execution.
