The death sentences keep coming from Branch 26 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. In July, the court’s presiding judge, Iman Afshari, pronounced the dreaded verdict for Pakhshan Azizi, a prominent Iranian women’s rights activist and social worker, who had already spent the previous year in prison. The trumped-up charge: “Rebellion” against the Islamic Republic. The reality: She had angered the theocracy with peaceful activism for human rights.
For Judge Afshari, it was a routine day in court. In his six years on the job, he has repeatedly imposed draconian sentences — including capital punishment, lengthy prison terms, exile, and even lashes — for the crime of expressing disagreement with the clerical dictatorship. His cruelty has drawn the attention of Western nations like Canada and the United Kingdom, both of which sanctioned the judge in 2022 as part of a name-and-shame campaign. However, while the United States has previously attempted to apply diplomatic pressure on Tehran by sanctioning other Iranian judges, it has yet to target Afshari. It should.
Iran’s judiciary purports to consist of independent and impartial courts of law that dispense justice. They’re anything but. The very existence of the Revolutionary Court system — a parallel judicial body, separate from the country’s criminal and civil courts, that tries political prisoners and dissidents, among others — reflects Tehran’s ideological agenda, which seeks to enforce the laws and norms of radical Shiite Islam. In a 2023 human rights report, the U.S. State Department noted that the Revolutionary Courts were responsible for “routinely holding grossly unfair trials without due process, handing down predetermined verdicts, and rubberstamping executions for political purposes.”
Afshari helps perpetuate this system. According to the California-based nonprofit United for Iran, the judge has issued more than 330 sentences over the course of his tenure, imposing a combined total of some 1,060 years of prison terms. He has targeted dissidents, human rights activists, artists, journalists, and ethnic and religious minorities. He has directed particular ire at women who defy the regime’s mandate to wear the hijab, or headscarf, in public.
For example, in 2019, the judge sentenced Saba Kord Afshari (the two are not related), at the time only 20 years old, to 24 years in jail for a range of charges that included protesting the hijab laws — or, as the court put it, “inciting and facilitating corruption and prostitution” by promoting “unveiling.” In a rare stroke of good luck, however, the regime ultimately released her in 2023 as part of a general amnesty for hundreds of prisoners to mark the 44th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
In another prominent case, Afshari sentenced two Bahai women, Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi, in 2022 to 10-year prison terms for their leadership roles in their religious community. Their trial lasted only one hour. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom condemned the ruling, noting that the Islamic Republic has subjected the Bahai to systematic religious discrimination for decades. Most jarringly, both Sabet and Kamalabadi previously served a decade-long prison sentence between 2008 and 2017 for their religious activities. That didn’t stop Afshari from imposing another one.
Christians in Iran haven’t fared any better. For example, in February 2024, Afshari sentenced Hakop Gochumyan, an Armenian Christian, to 10 years in prison for allegedly “engaging in deviant proselytizing activity that contradicts the sacred law of Islam.” In March, Afshari sentenced Laleh Sa’ati, a Christian convert, to a two-year jail term for allegedly “acting against national security through association with Zionist Christian organizations.” Score of other Christians have received prison sentences in recent years merely for practicing their faith.
Afshari’s fabricated charges often lack any meaningful evidence. In January 2024, Tehran hanged four ethnic Kurds, after 18 months in prison, for allegedly plotting with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency to blow up a missile and weapons factory belonging to Iran’s defense ministry. Tellingly, the court announced the sentence only after a brief, secret trial devoid of due process. The regime even broadcast the four defendants’ forced confessions, extracted through torture, on state television.
In another case with implausible charges, Afshari sentenced Iranian-Swedish dual national Saeed Azizi to five years in jail in January 2024 for alleged “assembly and collusion against national security.” In a trial beginning in December 2023, Afshari also advanced spurious charges of espionage and “corruption on earth” against Swedish diplomat Johan Floderus, whom Tehran had imprisoned in 2022.
In reality, the regime and Afshari were apparently working together to use both men as bargaining chips to secure the release of a former Iranian official from a Swedish jail. Tehran’s scheme succeeded. In June 2024, before Afshari could announce Floderus’s sentence, Iran traded the two Swedes for Hamid Nouri, whom Stockholm had previously sentenced to life in prison for his role in Iran’s 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners.
Afshari’s victims are legion, and they deserve support from Washington. While U.S. sanctions are unlikely to exert any significant economic impact on Afshari, naming and shaming him would send a powerful message to the Iranian people that America stands with them in the face of severe domestic repression. It’s long past time for the Biden administration to act.
Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow and senior editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X @TzviKahn.
