How Does the Judicial Corridor of Repression Work?

How Does the Judicial Corridor of Repression Work?

Who decides which branch and which judge will hear a protester’s case?

Why do the names of certain branches and judges recur in political and security cases, while hundreds of other judges serve in the same judiciary?

To answer these questions, I examined and compared the judiciary’s regulations on establishing specialist branches, its procedures for assigning cases, sentencing statistics, cases involving protesters in several provinces, rulings overturned by the Supreme Court, and the records of certain judges and branches. The findings point not so much to one or several “tough judges” as to a structure that might be called a “judicial corridor”.

First, we need to set aside a mistaken assumption: political cases are not necessarily distributed equally among all the judges of the Revolutionary Courts.

The 2019 regulation on the “Method for Establishing Specialist Branches of Judicial Authorities” explicitly permits specialist branches to be designated for “political, press and media offences”, as well as “offences against the country’s internal and external security”. The head of the provincial judiciary appoints judges to these branches in light of their “experience and expertise”.

The first filter therefore comes into play before the trial: not all judges are even among those who receive security-related cases.

This is not in itself unusual. Many countries also have specialist courts and judges. The question arises when the precise criteria for selecting judges for these branches are unclear to the public: why is one judge considered a “specialist in security cases” and another not?

The second stage is case assignment. The judiciary now also uses “intelligent assignment”: the system can distribute cases according to jurisdiction, caseload and the status of the branches. But this is not the final answer. If the system can choose only among a few branches designated in advance, the real question moves one step back: who decided which branches and judges would be included in this pool?

The available figures show that this is a serious question.

In its 2024 report, HRANA recorded 744 convictions in ideological and security cases. In the same dataset, Mohammadreza Tavakoli of Branch One of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court issued rulings against 57 people, Iman Afshari of Branch 26 in Tehran against 51, and Abolghasem Salavati of Branch 15 in Tehran against 26.

These three judges alone therefore accounted for 134 cases, about 18 per cent of all the documented cases in that report.

This figure does not mean 18 per cent of all political cases in Iran; HRANA does not have access to every case in the judiciary. But such a concentration calls for an explanation.

The severity of the sentences is also notable. In the same report, the stated average prison term in the cases handled by Tavakoli and Salavati was more than six years per person, while the average across the dataset as a whole was about three years. A death sentence, of course, cannot be converted into “months in prison” for this calculation; these figures therefore do not reflect the full severity of the punishments.

But the more important question arises when some of these very rulings are overturned by the Supreme Court.

The death sentence against Toomaj Salehi was issued by Branch One of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court, presided over by Mohammadreza Tavakoli, but the Supreme Court overturned it. Yet Tavakoli was not removed from sensitive cases and remained head of the same branch.

In Tehran, too, the Supreme Court has overturned several death sentences issued by Branch 26, presided over by Iman Afshari, but the branch has continued handling political cases.

Several death sentences issued by Branch 15 have also been overturned by the Supreme Court. In a seven-defendant case related to the protests of January 2026, three of the seven death sentences were overturned—that is, about 43 per cent of the sentences in that group.

The example of Karaj is even clearer. Branch One of the Karaj Revolutionary Court, presided over by Mousa Asef al-Hosseini, issued death sentences for five people in the case of Rouhollah Ajamian. Two sentences were upheld, but three were overturned by the Supreme Court and ultimately commuted to prison terms.

These cases do not, in themselves, prove that the judge committed misconduct. A ruling may be overturned because of an incomplete investigation, a legal flaw or a difference of interpretation of the law.

But one serious question remains:

If “expertise and experience” are the main reasons these judges are selected for sensitive cases, what role does the rate at which their rulings are overturned play in assessing their expertise?

This question becomes more important when the judiciary’s own Transformation Plan identifies “issuing well-founded judgments” and “the degree to which decisions are upheld by higher authorities” as indicators for evaluating judges’ performance.

During the research, another point also became clear: sometimes the “branch” outlasts the “judge”.

The names of Branches 15, 26 and 28 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court have repeatedly appeared in political cases from the years after the 2009 protests to the present. Judges have changed, but some branch numbers and the types of cases they handle have remained the same.

This changes the initial hypothesis. Perhaps the issue is not simply a few particular judges; some branches may, over time, have become fixed nodes for security cases within the judicial system.

During periods of protest, this structure has also become more visible. Judicial officials have repeatedly spoken of setting up “special branches” in prosecutors’ offices, Revolutionary Courts and even appeal courts. During the recent protests, the head of the judiciary spoke of selecting “experienced, capable and courageous” judges and of the need for speedy proceedings to create “deterrence”.

In such a structure, the court is not merely the final stage of a case. The process begins with the security agency and the investigating magistrate, passes through the prosecutor and a special branch, reaches the trial judge, and may then continue to an appeal court or the Supreme Court.

That is why “judicial corridor” is more precise than “repressive judge”. A judge alone cannot take someone from the street to prison or the gallows; a set of institutions and decisions creates that path.

So far, my research has not established one thing: I have found no document showing that, in every case, a security or judicial official directly orders that a case be assigned to a particular judge so that a particular sentence will be issued. Such a claim would go beyond the available evidence.

But one thing is clear: the legal and administrative structure needed to confine political cases to a set of specific branches and judges exists, and the available data also show that some of these same branches handle a substantial share of documented cases and severe sentences.

If this concentration is simply the result of expertise, experience and fair case assignment, the judiciary could respond by publishing clear statistics: How many branches does each Revolutionary Court have? How many branches receive security cases? What is each branch’s share? What criteria are used to select judges? And what proportion of their rulings are upheld or overturned by higher authorities?

I could find no such transparent database in public sources.

This lack of transparency does not prove that case assignment is manipulated; but it prevents society, lawyers and researchers from testing the claim of “expertise and fairness in case assignment”.

And, finally, three questions remain:

**If expertise and experience really are the criteria for selecting these judges, why do some of them continue to preside over sensitive cases after very severe rulings—even death sentences—have been overturned?**

**If cases are assigned fairly and according to transparent rules, why can defendants and their lawyers not find out what specific criteria led to a case being assigned to a particular branch?**

And finally:

**Is what we see in the Revolutionary Courts merely judicial specialisation, or has the Islamic Republic built, within the formal judicial system, a corridor through which political cases pass from arrest to verdict, via a limited and predictable set of court branches and judges?**