Iranian rights lawyer Javad Alikordi has been sentenced to 18 years in prison, HRANA reported, more than six months after his arrest in connection with a memorial for his brother, rights attorney Khosrow Alikordi, who died under suspicious circumstances.
The rights group said Branch 1 of the Mashhad Revolutionary Court sentenced Alikordi to five years in prison on charges of “assembly and collusion to act against national security” and 13 years for “propaganda against national security” under Iran’s newly hardened espionage-related legislation.
Under Iran’s sentencing rules for multiple convictions, if the ruling is upheld, Alikordi would serve the longest prison term handed down in the case, which is 13 years.
Alikordi, who is being held in Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, was also sentenced to two years of exile in Saravan, in the underprivileged Sistan and Baluchestan province, and a two-year ban on leaving the country.
HRANA said he was arrested by security forces at his workplace in Mashhad in December 2025, days after the death of his brother Khosrow who was a prominent lawyer who represented jailed protesters, political prisoners and bereaved families seeking justice for relatives killed during Iran’s 2022 protests.
Khosrow Alikordi was found dead in his office in Mashhad under unclear circumstances in December. Iranian authorities cited cardiac arrest, but fellow lawyers, activists and some relatives of victims he represented questioned the official account and called for an independent investigation.
Javad Alikordi, a lawyer, university lecturer and former member of the Sabzevar City Council, had also represented political prisoners and families of slain protesters.
He was arrested after protesting the detention of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and other activists during Khosrow's memorial.
Rights groups say he has faced repeated judicial pressure over his legal and human rights work.
Parisa Valentina Pouyan, director of the Pouya Helpers of Child Workers Institute, told Iran’s labor-focused ILNA news agency that baby-selling is a hidden and complex phenomenon driven not only by poverty but also by addiction, cultural pressures, weak oversight, lack of parenting education and failures in state protection systems.
“Buying and selling children is one of the most horrifying forms of social harm and one of the most damaging acts committed against children,” Pouyan said.
Her remarks followed renewed attention in Iranian media to the case of a mother accused of selling several of her newborns over different years for small sums, reviving concerns about underground markets for infants and the future awaiting children transferred outside legal adoption channels.
A recent analytical report by Iran’s State Welfare Organization, known as Behzisti, found that illegal adoption remains a serious challenge for the country’s child-protection and judicial systems.
According to the report, 18,240 adoption cases were registered from 2013 to 2024, of which 13,020, or 71 percent, were legal, while 5,224, or 29 percent, were recorded as illegal.
Behzisti is the main state body responsible for welfare and child-protection cases in Iran, including formal adoption procedures. Illegal adoptions take place outside that system, often through private arrangements, brokers or concealed transfers of newborns.
Pouyan said official and precise statistics on baby-selling do not exist because the practice is hidden. But she said poverty creates fertile ground for such cases, especially during wider social and economic crises.
Still, she warned against reducing the issue to poverty alone.
“Would every poor family sell its child?” she said. “If parents have sold a child once and their living conditions improve a little, does that mean they will never do it again?”
Pouyan said global experience shows baby-selling has become a lucrative trade in some places, and that poverty is only one driver. She cited addiction, sex work, cultural pressures and the possibility that a mother herself may have been a victim of child-selling as factors that can feed the trade.
She said the hidden nature of illegal transfers means the child’s future is often irrelevant to the transaction.
“In this kind of trade, parents who sell their baby or child do not care whether the buyers have the conditions and qualifications needed to become parents,” she said, adding that in illegal transfers “money comes first.”
Pouyan said she had personally been approached several years ago by someone seeking a child for a couple living abroad, both doctors, who wanted to adopt by finding a parent willing to sell a child. She said she rejected the request and warned she would report any such case.
According to Pouyan, the darker danger is that not all buyers are seeking parenthood.
In some cases, she said, children are bought or taken through illegal adoption channels for domestic labor or other forms of exploitation.
“I have seen a case in which a child was illegally adopted and, a few years later, became the family’s servant,” she said.
Pouyan said Iran’s response to baby-selling and illegal adoption is weakened by poor oversight, ineffective intervention by responsible agencies and possible misconduct inside institutions meant to protect children.
Mizan described the two men as “enemy foot soldiers” and “armed leaders of the January coup” in Shahrud, saying protesters had created what it called the pretext and conditions for hostile action by Iran’s enemies.
Mohammad-Sadegh Akbari, the head of the judiciary in Semnan province, accused Zamani and Saedi of taking part in unrest, damaging bank branches, creating disorder outside the governor’s office, overturning and burning a police vehicle, and attacking homes and cars.
Mizan said the charges against them also included inciting people to attend protests, assembly and collusion against domestic and foreign security, moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” and “corruption on earth.”
Officials and state media in Iran have repeatedly sought to discredit anti-government protests by labeling them “riots,” “unrest” or a “coup” and linking them to foreign actors, including the United States and Israel.
Mizan also published a 50-second video it described as the men’s confessions, with their faces blurred.
Rights groups and former detainees have repeatedly reported the use of forced confessions under pressure, torture and harsh detention conditions in the Islamic Republic’s prisons.
Iran has sharply increased executions in recent months, including political prisoners accused of taking part in the January protests or facing espionage-related charges.
In early June, the Islamic Republic executed Mehrdad Mohammadinia and Ashkan Maleki, two January protesters, over allegations that they set fire to a mosque in Tehran.
