TEHRAN, 10 March 2005 — An Iranian appeals court has ruled that dissident academic Hashem Aghajari, once condemned to death for blasphemy, does not have to go back to jail and can resume teaching, his lawyer announced yesterday. Aghajari, who lost a leg fighting in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, drew the wrath of powerful hardliners in 2002 when he said in a speech that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” religious leaders.
A court in the western city of Hamedan initially sentenced the leftist scholar to hang, and even upheld its verdict when a retrial was ordered in the face of angry student protests and international pressure. Last year, the hard-line judiciary held another retrial, and reduced the charges to “insulting religious sanctities”, “propagating against the regime” and “spreading false information to disturb the public mind”.
The death penalty was commuted to five years in jail, and Aghajari was freed on bail in July, pending the result of a fresh appeal. Aghajari’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, said the appeals court only upheld a lesser charge of “insulting religious sanctities”, and deemed that the 23 months already served, much of it in solitary confinement, were adequate punishment for the speech.
“If the case had been handled by the judges of the appeals court in the first place, they would have definitely found me innocent,” Aghajari said in a statement read out by Nikbakht.
The appeals court also removed a ban on teaching and writing and an order that Aghajari be “deprived of social rights” for five years, Nikbakht told reporters.
However, Nikbakht said the latest appellate verdict would be challenged, given that his client was determined to be cleared of any wrongdoing. “I haven’t insulted any sanctities. What I said was quoting some statements from clerics,” complained the Tehran University history professor.
