Three Student Activists Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison by Revolutionary Court

Simultaneously with the arrest of several students in recent days, the Revolutionary Court has sentenced three students who were detained after the protests in December to nine years in prison. According to the Telegram channel of the National Student Guilds, the Revolutionary Court has sentenced Leila Hosseinzadeh, an anthropology student at the University of Tehran, to six years in prison and a two-year travel ban. Additionally, Sina Rabiei, a social sciences student at the University of Tehran, has been sentenced to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban, and Mohsen Haqshenas, a stage design student at the University of Tehran, has also been sentenced to two years in prison. These students were arrested following the December protests. The charges against them were stated as 'propaganda against the regime' and 'actions against national security and disruption of public order and peace through participation in illegal gatherings.' Following the December protests, Iran's Ministry of Intelligence arrested over 100 student activists, most of whom were from the University of Tehran. In this regard, Farid Mousavi and Mahmoud Sadeghi, representatives from Tehran in the parliament, reported that most of the arrests were described by them as 'preventive.' However, legal experts such as Shirin Ebadi and Nasrin Sotoudeh have stated that there is no law in Iran for preemptive arrests before a crime occurs. Mahmoud Sadeghi also announced on Friday, March 2, that a legal case has been formed for about 50 of these students. In this context, 22 student organizations from the faculties of the University of Tehran announced in a letter to the Minister of Science on Wednesday, March 1, that several of these students have now been summoned again to the Revolutionary Court and are facing serious charges. More than 1,500 students from the University of Tehran and Tehran University of Medical Sciences also declared in a protest statement that they would remain 'sensitive' to the issuance of judicial sentences and the formation of cases that lead to 'any kind of entanglement, deprivation, and imprisonment' for the detained students. The arrests of students have continued after the December protests. For instance, Parisa Rafiei, a student from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, was arrested on March 6 and remains imprisoned. Sultan-Ali Rafiei, the father of this student, stated that she was arrested by the Intelligence Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but her place of detention is still unknown. Meanwhile, Marzieh Amiri, a social sciences student at the University of Tehran, has also been detained since Thursday, March 8, and along with several other women arrested on International Women's Day, has been transferred to the general section of Qarchak Prison. Hassan Rouhani, during his campaign for the presidential election in 2013, promised to remove the stars from students, reinstate them, and open up university spaces. However, in recent years, 92 student organizations, 813 student publication activists, and 8,000 student activists have separately protested against the existence of an 'atmosphere of intimidation and threat' and a 'security' environment in universities, which has led to the cancellation of student organization programs and 'illegal and extrajudicial interventions' in their holding. Earlier, the newspaper 'Jameh-Farda' reported on December 1 that at least 150 master's and doctoral students had been star-marked in October of this year, stating that they faced 'messages of deficiencies in their files' and were barred from entering universities.