Moghayeseh: The Judge of Prison and Death
Moghayeseh: The Judge of Prison and Death
May God curse you; your mouth should be filled with gunpowder, and your tongue cut off. This is the account of Ali Mojtahedzadeh, a lawyer, from the trial session of Masoud Kazemi in Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court and the words that Mohammad Moghayeseh addressed to this journalist during his trial. This is a common and similar narrative shared by those whose fates were overturned by the verdicts issued by the judge of Branch 28.
Bahareh Hedayat, a student activist, wrote that in court he said, ‘I watch the riot videos twice a day, once in the morning and once at night, to come to court refreshed. I know well what to do with you.’ His logic was the same for everyone: ‘I’ll make an example out of you.’ Mohammad Moghayeseh, the judge of Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, has been promoted from this branch to the Supreme Court. A knowledgeable source told Radio Farda that the order for Judge Moghayeseh’s promotion was issued two weeks ago, and he is set to take a position as a counselor at the Supreme Court.
According to this source, the Supreme Court is the highest judicial authority, and the transfer of Judge Moghayeseh from the Revolutionary Court to this court is a promotion in every sense of the word. This promotion was carried out at his own insistence, and since the presidency of Amoli Larijani, the previous head of the judiciary, Moghayeseh had requested a transfer to the Supreme Court.
A lawyer told Iran Gate that Mohammad Moghayeseh’s presence in the Supreme Court is very dangerous. He explained that Mr. Moghayeseh was a very uneducated judge and a yes-man for the security apparatus. His departure from Branch 28 is very good, but because he didn’t know the law, we always hoped to overturn his verdicts at the Supreme Court. But now he himself has gone to the Supreme Court as a counselor, meaning a judge, and he is a decision-maker there, which is dangerous.
Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, alongside Branch 15, have been special branches in recent years where most political and security cases were referred to, and they are known for issuing heavy sentences of execution, imprisonment, and flogging. These two branches have been responsible for trying many political and civil activists, journalists, and protesters since 2009.
According to calculations by the Iran Prisons Atlas website, Mohammad Moghayeseh has issued 1,653 years of imprisonment in 335 cases in recent years alone. The image presented by political and civil activists and journalists who were tried by Judge Moghayeseh is one of immorality, ignorance, violence, cruelty, and issuing very heavy sentences. Zia Nabavi, a student activist, wrote that in 2009, during a court session, he said to two co-defendants, ‘Tell the truth, in whose house was the blog found?’
Shahabeddin Nazari, a political activist, wrote that the trial lasted no more than 10-15 minutes. He was nervous and aggressive, and my lawyer was threatened with expulsion from the session, resulting in a one-year imprisonment. According to a report by the Haft-Tappeh detainees’ defense campaign, Judge Moghayeseh explicitly announced during the trial of the defendants in the Haft-Tappeh case that the sentences issued against them were very pleasing to God and just, and with these sentences, he had secured his afterlife.
The issuance of 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 managers of the Baha’i community; 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 some Iranians abroad, including Googoosh, are among the sentences issued by Mohammad Moghayeseh. Majid Tavakoli, Bahareh Hedayat, Abolfazl Ghadiani, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Mehdi Hashemi, and many protesters of recent years’ demonstrations are among those whose cases were handled by Mohammad Moghayeseh.
Before 2017 and the trial of the defendants in Babak Zanjani’s case, no photos of Mohammad Moghayeseh had been published. There was also little information about his background before 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 Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that the reason for such secrecy was due to the dark and indefensible past of Mohammad Moghayeseh, or as the prisoners of the 1980s and 1990s remember, interrogator or prosecutor Nasirian.
According to Mr. Mesdaghi, Mohammad Moghayeseh was one of the most malicious figures of the Islamic Republic in prisons. He explained that Moghayeseh, or Nasirian, began working in the Islamic Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office in 1981, where he was a deputy in the branch and actively participated in torturing political prisoners. He was in Branch 3 of Evin, and after that, in 1985, he became the supervising deputy at Ghezel Hesar prison, and after the closure of Ghezel Hesar, he became the supervising deputy at Rajaei Shahr prison. During the 1988 massacre, he played an active role in killing prisoners in Gohardasht prison. At that time, besides being the deputy of the prison, he was also the head of Gohardasht prison.
In fact, without having any legal or educational background in this field, he reached the position of deputy in the prison only because he had passed a very limited amount of seminary courses. After the 1988 massacre, he was transferred to Evin and became the deputy of Evin prison. Several deputies also worked under him. Later, he was transferred to the central prosecutor’s building on Moalem Street. It was later, in the 2000s, that he took over the presidency of Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court, where he issued many verdicts against political prisoners.
On December 19, 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury placed Mohammad Moghayeseh, 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 Islamic Republic’s show trials, where journalists, lawyers, political activists, and members of ethnic and religious minorities have been punished for their right to free expression and assembly and sentenced to long-term imprisonment, flogging, and even execution.
