TEHRAN, 11 August 2004 — Dissident Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari, who has won two court battles to overturn death sentences, launched a fresh legal appeal yesterday hoping to quash a five-year prison sentence for insulting Islam.
Aghajari incurred the wrath of religious hardliners in the Islamic state for a 2002 speech in which he urged Muslims not to follow clerical leaders “like monkeys”.
After a two-year legal battle, during which a provincial court twice issued death sentences against Aghajari for blasphemy, the history lecturer was handed a five-year jail term in June after a retrial.
“Aghajari criticized some clerics and their followers but he has not insulted religious sanctities nor has he objected to any rulings of Islam,” Saleh Nikbakht, who introduced the new appeal with Iran’s Supreme Court, told Reuters. “As we have shown in the last two years, our defense is based on legal logic and reasoning,” he said. Aghajari was released on bail 10 days ago after friends met his bail of 970 million rials ($113,000).
Two years of his prison sentence were suspended and with two years already spent in jail he would only have to serve another year in prison if the sentence was confirmed.
His original death sentence sparked some of the largest student demonstrations for years in Iran and was widely condemned by human rights groups. His case is seen by political analysts as a test of the limits on free speech in Iran.
Aghajari, who lost a leg fighting in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, was then sentenced to five years in jail, two of which were suspended, together with five years “deprivation of social rights” — including the right to speak in public, teach or publish.
Meanwhile, Iran’s hard-line judiciary has shut down another reformist newspaper, Nassim Saba (Morning Breeze), run by a political ally of President Mohammad Khatami, the state news agency IRNA reported yesterday.
The managing editor of the paper, Rasul Montajebnia, said the courts had told the Islamic republic’s reformist-run Culture Ministry to withdraw the newspaper’s permission to publish.
Montajebnia is a prominent member of the Assembly of Combatant Clerics, the left-leaning party of Khatami.
In recent years, the Iranian judiciary has maintained a concerted crackdown on the press, closing down at least 100 publications — most of them pro-reform. Last month, both the newspapers Vaghayeh Etefaghieh and Jomhuriat — considered close to the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the main reformist party led by Khatami’s brother — were also shut down.
