Mehrdad Sarjoie is serving a three-year sentence at Evin Prison for espionage. Despite many appeals for his release, including a letter from Hassan Rouhani, he remains in detention.
Name: Mehrdad Sarjoie
Career: Journalist; parliamentary reporter for English-language newspapers Iran News and Tehran Times; public-relations director for the Expediency Discernment Council’s Center for Strategic Studies.
Charges: Spying, cooperating with “hostile countries” through the publication of articles, interviews and news.
Mehrdad Sarjoie was arrested by Intelligence Ministry agents at his home in July 2011 and was taken to Cell Block 209 at Evin Prison. He was initially charged with spying. After seven months in detention, he was tried in January 2012 at Branch 26 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court presided over by Judge Pir Abbasi, who mitigated his charge from spying to cooperating with hostile countries through publishing news that benefited them. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
He was released on bail in April 2012 after spending 10 months in prison to await his appeal. In August 2012, Branch 54 of the Revolutionary Appeals Court upheld the sentence but suspended seven years of his 10-year sentence. He started his three-year sentence on November 28, 2012.
Between 2006 and 2011 Sarjoie was the public-relations director at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Expediency Discernment Council, a powerful advisory body whose members are appointed by the Supreme Leader. At the time of his arrest and trial, Hassan Rouhani was president of the center and when Sarjoie’s wife appealed to him, Rouhani wrote a letter to the Islamic Judiciary and explained that he himself was responsible for what the center had published. However, Sarjoie was neither pardoned or granted a furlough.
Sarjoie’s wife described the trial to the Green Movement-affiliated news website Jaras. “There was one session,” she said, “and anybody who saw it would find it strange. Nobody talked and there was no [oral] defense. They even told us that when we entered the courtroom nobody was allowed to talk. The judge, the accused and his lawyer wrote their own legal statements. It’s not what you expect from a courtroom in which people are meant to defend themselves. My spouse is not one for quarreling, but he did protest this. He said to the judge, ‘if there’s a God and a faith and you believe in them then one day you’ll have to answer for your verdict’.”
Mehrdad Sarjoie is currently serving a three-year sentence at Evin Prison.
For more information, visit Journalism is Not a Crime, documenting cases of jailed journalists in Iran.
This is part of IranWire’s series Crime: Journalism, a portfolio on the legal and political persecution of Iranian journalists and bloggers, published in both Persian and English.
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