Moghiseh: The Judge of Prison and Death
Moghiseh: The Judge of Prison and Death
May God curse you, your mouth should be filled with gunpowder, and may your tongue be cut. This is a narrative by Ali Mojtahedzadeh, a lawyer, from the trial session of Masoud Kazemi in Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court and the words that Mohammad Moghiseh addressed to this journalist during his trial. It is a common and similar narrative from those whose fates were overturned by the rulings issued by the judge of Branch 28.
Bahareh Hedayat, a student activist, wrote that in court he said, ‘I watch the riot footage twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, to come to court alert. I know well what to do with you all.’ His logic was the same for everyone: ‘I will make an example of you.’ Mohammad Moghiseh, the judge of Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, was promoted from this branch to the Supreme Court. A knowledgeable source told Radio Farda that the order for Judge Moghiseh’s promotion was issued two weeks ago, and he is set to assume the position of a counselor at the Supreme Court.
According to this source, the Supreme Court is the highest judicial authority, and transferring Judge Moghiseh from the Revolutionary Court to this court is a true promotion, a promotion that occurred at his insistence. Since the presidency of Amoli Larijani, the former head of the judiciary, Moghiseh has sought to be transferred to the Supreme Court.
A lawyer told Iran Gate that Mohammad Moghiseh’s presence in the Supreme Court is very dangerous. He explained that Mr. Moghiseh was a very uneducated judge and a yes-man to the security apparatus. His departure from Branch 28 is very good, but since he didn’t know the law, we always hoped to go to the Supreme Court and overturn his rulings. But now he himself has gone to the court as a counselor, meaning a judge, and is a decision-maker there, which is dangerous.
Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, alongside Branch 15, has in recent years been one of the special branches to which most political and security cases were referred and became known for issuing heavy sentences of execution, imprisonment, and flogging. These two branches have been responsible for the trial of many political and civil activists, journalists, and protesters since 2009.
According to the calculations of the Iran Prison Atlas website, Mohammad Moghiseh has issued 1,653 years of prison sentences in 335 cases in just a few recent years. The image that narratives of political and civil activists and journalists tried by Judge Moghiseh present of him is one of misconduct, ignorance, violence, cruelty, and issuing very harsh sentences. Zia Nabavi, a student activist, wrote that in 2009, in a court session addressing two co-defendants, he said, ‘Tell the truth, whose house was the blog found in?’
Shahabeddin Nazari, a political activist, wrote that the trial didn’t last more than 10-15 minutes. He was nervous and aggressive, and my lawyer was threatened with expulsion from the session and eventually sentenced to one year of imprisonment. According to a report by the Haft-Tappeh Detainees Defense Campaign, Judge Moghiseh explicitly stated during the presence of the defendants in court that the sentences issued against the Haft-Tappeh defendants were very God-pleasing and just, and with these sentences, I have secured my afterlife.
Issuing death sentences for Jafar Kazemi, Hamed Rouhinejad, Shahram Ahmadi, Mohammad Ali Haj Aghaei, Saeed Malekpour, and Mohammad Amin Valian; 140 years of imprisonment for seven Baha’i community leaders; 33 years of imprisonment and 148 lashes for Nasrin Sotoudeh; 89 years of imprisonment for the defendants of the Aparat website; 20 and a half years of imprisonment and 198 lashes for Mehdi Mousavi and Fatemeh Ekhtesari; 45 years of imprisonment for the detainees of the Haft-Tappeh case; and in absentia prison sentences for several Iranians abroad, including Googoosh, are among the sentences issued by Mohammad Moghiseh. Majid Tavakoli, Bahareh Hedayat, Abolfazl Ghadiani, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Mehdi Hashemi, and many protesters of recent years are among those whose cases were handled by Mohammad Moghiseh.
Until 2017 and the trial of the defendants in the Babak Zanjani case, no photo of Mohammad Moghiseh had been published. Little information about his background was available until he became the head of Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court. Iraj Mesdaghi, a human rights activist and former political prisoner who spent ten years from 1981 to 1991 in Evin, Ghezel Hesar, and Gohardasht prisons, said in an interview with the Human Rights Campaign in Iran that the reason for such secrecy was due to the dark and indefensible background of Mohammad Moghiseh, or as the prisoners of the 1980s and 1990s remember him, interrogator or prosecutor Nasirian.
According to Mr. Mesdaghi, Mohammad Moghiseh was one of the most wicked figures of the Islamic Republic in prisons. He explained that Moghiseh or Nasirian started working in the Islamic Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office in 1980, where he was a prosecutor of a branch and actively participated in the torture of political prisoners. He was in Branch 3 of Evin. After that, in 1985, he became the supervising prosecutor of Ghezel Hesar prison, and after the closure of Ghezel Hesar prison, he became the supervising prosecutor of Rajai Shahr prison. During the 1988 massacre, he played an active role in killing prisoners in Gohardasht prison. At that time, apart from being the prison’s prosecutor, he was also the head of Gohardasht prison.
In fact, without having legal or educational knowledge in this field, just because he had passed a very limited number of seminary courses, he reached the post of prosecutor in prison. After the 1988 massacre, he was transferred to Evin and became the prosecutor of Evin prison. A number of prosecutors also worked under him. Later, he was transferred to the central prosecutor’s office building on Moallem Street. It was later in the 2000s that he took over the presidency of Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, where he issued many sentences against political prisoners.
On December 19, 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury placed Mohammad Moghiseh, along with Abolghasem Salavati, the head of Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court, on its sanctions list for their involvement in punishing the people of Iran and dual citizens. They are accused of distorting justice by presiding over the regime’s show trials. Trials where journalists, lawyers, political activists, and members of ethnic and religious minorities have been punished and sentenced to long-term imprisonment, flogging, and even execution for their right to freedom of expression and assembly.
