Iran's Persecution of Rights: The Pursuit of Lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei (Shahryar)

A few weeks ago, my significant other and I were having a conversation about the state of affairs in Iran in the wake of the Green Movement’s uprising and the Government's attempt to stop it.. After looking at all the information at hand, she looked at me and said, “They started with arresting ordinary Iranians, then, journalists; I wonder who is next.”

Well, her question seems to have been answered. Human Rights Lawyers.

Prominent human rights activist and lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei was questioned last week by authorities. A couple of days later, they came against for him, this time for detention. Apparently, he was not in his office; he remains missing. His wife Fereshteh Halimi, and brother-in-law, Farhad Haleemi, who were near the office, were arrested.

Mostafaei is not the first lawyer the government has wanted to detain. Many were arrested early in the crisis and then released, including influential feminist and human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr. But in those days, the government was arresting anyone it could get its hands on. They didn’t really care if the jails were filled because their other detention facilities --– such as the infamous Kahrizak Prison --- had shipping containers on hand to hold detainees if no cells were available.

Now that the situation is calmer, at least in appearance, the government has embarked on a campaign to detain prominent Iranians fighting for human rights. Mostafaei’s case may be the most crucial because he is probably the most overburdened lawyer in Tehran.

Recently, Mostafaei emerged in the Western media through his representation of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the woman convicted of adultery who was about to be stoned to death. She, however, is only one of his clients. The majority of human rights cases currently in courts in Tehran that we here in West get to hear about are all cases that Mostafaei has taken and worked on for years. Every time a child is facing the death penalty in Iran, he is the first lawyer to take up the case. He also takes on most of the other cases involving women accused of adultery, a crime punishable by stoning in Iran. Journalists, human rights activists,and political dissidents cases are also represented by Mostafaei.

Even before the publicity for his representation of Ashtiani, Mostafaei had won a hard-fought battle in Iran’s courts when he was able to convince the family of a victim to forgive juvenile Hossein Haghi, accused of murder when he was 14. His work with juvenile offenders has won him respect among human rights activists not just in Iran but also abroad.

Mostafaei was one of the early detainees after the election last year in June, but was later released on bail. The arrest did not deter him, as he took on more clients. The pressure to take up more of these cases was prompted by two factors. Other human rights lawyers like Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and Shadi Sadr had been forced into exile by the government, and the regime was detaining more and more Iranians on almost a daily basis.

Last Saturday, Mostafaei was summoned to Evin prison and questioned about his work for hours. He later posted a blog entry hinting that he believed he would be arrested. If imprisoned, he will join human rights lawyers Mohammad Oliayifard, currently serving a one-year sentence. If he makes it out of the country, he will join an alarming number of Iranian intellectuals who have been forced into exile. In either case, he will not be able to defend Iranians against the regime's interpretation and application of the law

Most importantly, as Mostafaei was the most prominent human rights lawyer who had been allowed to work relatively freely inside Iran, his arrest means that his colleagues will have to be extremely careful from now on. The duties of a human rights lawyer in Iran are now even more dangerous than it was before.