A Predictable Outrage

The trial of 13 Iranian Jews on charges of spying for Israel, which ended with the conviction of 10 of the defendants, has been a parody of justice from beginning to end. The accused were arrested last year and held incommunicado. They were not permitted to meet with lawyers until days before their trial began in April, nor were they told what evidence supposedly underlay the allegations against them. According to a defense attorney, no evidence was presented in the closed trial to show that any of the 13, some of them lay religious leaders in the southern city of Shiraz, even had access to classified information. Instead the prosecutor, who also acted as judge in the Revolutionary Court, relied on confessions by eight of the accused. What coercion was applied to get those confessions can be readily imagined.

Diplomats in Iran saw the trial as part of the power struggle between the country’s reformers and its religious hard-liners. By attacking a vulnerable minority, the anti-reform clique hoped to undercut President Mohammad Khatami’s tentative moves to improve relations with the West. The European Union, the United States and others concerned with international norms of justice and human rights have protested sharply against the trial and the sentences of up to 13 years’ imprisonment that followed the convictions.

The trial has cast a chill over the 30,000 members of a Jewish community whose roots in Iran go back more than 2,000 years. There’s little doubt it was intended to. The judge-prosecutor claimed in his verdict that the alleged spy network was “founded on the basis of Judaism” and made it a point to pass sentence on the Jewish Sabbath. Many Iranian Jews emigrated after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Thousands more may now find it prudent to leave.

Defense lawyers plan to appeal the sentences on the credible grounds that no evidence was presented to justify them, but this was never a case that had much to do with evidence or due process or truth. This was about the raw exercise of power, and Iran’s judicial system stands condemned by its outrageous but all too predictable outcome.