How Does the Judicial Corridor of Repression Work?

How Does the Judicial Corridor of Repression Work?

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

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

To answer these questions, I examined and compared the judiciary's regulations on establishing specialised branches and assigning cases, sentencing statistics, protesters' cases in several provinces, judgments overturned by the Supreme Court, and the records of certain judges and branches. Rather than pointing to one or several ‘harsh judges’, the findings reveal a structure that might be called a ‘judicial corridor’.

First, a misconception must be set aside: political cases are not necessarily distributed equally among all Revolutionary Court judges.

The regulations on ‘How to Establish Specialised Branches of Judicial Authorities’, approved in 1398, expressly allow specialised branches to be designated for ‘political, press and media offences’ and for ‘offences against the country's internal and external security’. The head of the provincial judiciary selects these branches with reference to the judges' ‘experience and expertise’.

The first filter therefore takes shape before the trial: not all judges are even in the pool eligible to receive a security case.

This is not unusual in itself. Many countries also have specialised courts and judges. The question arises when the precise criteria for choosing judges for these branches are not clear to the public: why is one judge recognised as a ‘specialist in security cases’ and another is not?

The second stage is the assignment of the case. The judiciary now also uses ‘intelligent assignment’: a system can distribute cases according to jurisdiction, caseload and the circumstances of the branches. But that is not the final answer. If the system may choose only among a few branches selected in advance, the real question moves back a stage: who put those branches and judges into the pool?

The available statistics show that this is a serious question.

HRANA's report for 1403 documented 744 instances of conviction in belief-related and security cases. Within that dataset, Mohammadreza Tavakkoli, at Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court, had sentenced 57 people; Iman Afshari, at Branch 26 in Tehran, 51; and Abolghasem Salavati, at Branch 15 in Tehran, 26.

Those three judges alone thus accounted for 134 instances, or approximately 18 per cent of all the cases documented in that report.

This 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 also deserves attention. In the same report, the average nominal prison term in the sets of sentences issued by Tavakkoli and Salavati exceeded six years per person, while the average across the dataset was around three years. A death sentence is not converted into ‘months of imprisonment’ in this calculation, so these figures do not capture the full severity of the punishments.

But a more important question arises when some of these same judgments are overturned by the Supreme Court.

Toomaj Salehi's death sentence was issued by Branch 1 of the Isfahan Revolutionary Court, presided over by Mohammadreza Tavakkoli, but the Supreme Court overturned it. Tavakkoli nevertheless continued to hear sensitive cases and remained head of the same branch.

In Tehran, too, the Supreme Court has overturned several death sentences issued by Branch 26 under Iman Afshari, yet the branch has continued to handle political cases.

At Branch 15, numerous death sentences have also been overturned by the Supreme Court. In a seven-person case concerning the protests of Dey 1404, three of the seven death sentences were overturned: approximately 43 per cent of that particular set.

The Karaj example is even clearer. In the Ruhollah Ajamian case, Branch 1 of the Karaj Revolutionary Court, presided over by Mousa Asef-al-Hosseini, sentenced five people to death. Two sentences were upheld, but three were overturned by the Supreme Court and ultimately replaced with imprisonment.

These instances do not, in themselves, prove misconduct by a judge. A judgment may be overturned because of an incomplete investigation, a legal defect or a difference in the interpretation of the law.

But a serious question remains:

If ‘expertise and experience’ are the principal reasons these judges are chosen for sensitive cases, what role does the rate at which their judgments are overturned play in assessing their expertise?

This question becomes more important when the judiciary's own transformation document identifies ‘issuing sound judgments’ and ‘the degree to which decisions are accepted by higher authorities’ as indicators for evaluating judges' performance.

Another point emerged during the research: sometimes a ‘branch’ outlasts the ‘judge’.

The names of Branches 15, 26 and 28 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court have appeared repeatedly in political cases from the years following the protests of 1388 to the present. The judges have changed, but certain branch numbers and the kinds of cases they handle have remained.

This alters the initial hypothesis. The issue may not be confined to a few particular judges; certain branches may gradually have become fixed nodes for security cases within the judicial structure.

During periods of protest, this structure has also become more explicit. Judicial officials have repeatedly spoken of establishing ‘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 swift proceedings to create ‘deterrence’.

In such a structure, the court is not simply the final stage of a case. The route begins with security officials acting as judicial officers and the investigating judge, passes through the prosecutor and a special branch, reaches the trial judge and may then continue in 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 to the gallows; a set of institutions and decisions creates that route.

My research has not, so far, established one thing: I found no document showing that, in each case, a security or judicial official directly orders a file to 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 restrict political cases to a specified pool of branches and judges exists. The available data also show that some of those same branches account for a considerable share of documented cases and harsh sentences.

If this concentration is simply the result of expertise, experience and fair case assignment, the judiciary can respond by publishing clear statistics: how many branches does each Revolutionary Court have? How many receive security cases? What share goes to each branch? What are the criteria for selecting judges? And what proportion of their judgments is upheld or overturned by higher courts?

I found no such transparent database in public sources.

This lack of transparency does not prove that case assignment is manipulated. But it deprives the public, lawyers and researchers of the means to test the claim of ‘expertise and fairness in assignment’.

Three questions remain:

If the criteria for choosing these judges really are expertise and experience, why do some continue to hear sensitive cases after extremely harsh sentences, including death sentences, have been overturned?

If cases are assigned fairly and according to transparent rules, why can the defendant and defence counsel not know the specific criteria by which the case reached a particular branch?

And finally:

Is what we see in the Revolutionary Courts simply judicial specialisation, or has the Islamic Republic built, within the formal justice system, a corridor that takes a political case from arrest to judgment through a limited and predictable set of branches and judges?