On January 20, Iranian doctors Kamyar and Arash Alaei were sentenced to three and six years, respectively, in prison for allegedly plotting to overthrow the Iranian state. The brothers are renowned in the international AIDS-prevention community for their passionate advocacy of harm reduction programs and noted for their apparent patriotism. Two other defendants were also found guilty of plotting to overthrow the state, although the Iranian government refused to reveal their identities.
The Alaei brothers studied in the US, at the schools of public health at SUNY-Albany and Harvard, and have participated in AIDS conferences hosted by institutions such as the Aspen Institute. They are regarded as leaders in the harm reduction approach, and were instrumental in establishing Iran as a world leader in HIV-prevention, according to the UN AIDS program. Their approach confronts two realities about which Iran’s government is in very public denial – homosexuality and drug use. They distribute needles and condoms freely at their clinic, ask no questions, and take no names. In 2006, UN AIDS coordinator Hamid Setayesh praised harm reduction programs in Iran’s prisons, ranking the country among the top ten in the world.
Little has been said by the Iranian government about the crimes that the Alaeis allegedly committed. In August, Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, Hassan Haddad, accused them of training people abroad to promote a velvet revolution. The oddly-phrased accusation of trying to start a “velvet revolution” is one which has frequently been applied to citizens with foreign contacts over the past three years, especially following the (at least initially) successful citizen uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. While promoting democracy, giving unauthorized interviews, or even meeting or accepting funding from pro-democracy organizations are dangerous activities in Iran, the brothers have no known contact with any foreign political organization; they were even described by Physicians for Human Rights’ Sarah Kalloch as highly patriotic and deeply involved in Iranian culture.
The Alaeis’ incarceration and trial was typical of Iran’s inhumane justice system, and their six month pretrial detention was illegal even under the country’s lax laws. Dr. Arash was arrested on charges of communicating with an unnamed “enemy government” on 22 June, and Dr. Kamiar the next day. The trial was not held until 31 December, and they were denied access to their lawyer until that date. At the trial it was announced that they faced secret charges, against which they had neither the time nor the knowledge to prepare a defense. It is now clear that they were secretly charged with trying to overthrow the state. They were convicted in a trial which lasted only half a day, with the sentence announced on 20 January. The conviction was based on the doctors’ alleged confession; in Iran, a confession indicates a high likelihood that the defendant was tortured before the trial. The least bad part of this grim saga is that the doctors only face a few years in Iran’s notorious Evin prison – where political prisoners are deprived of sleep and medical treatment, and housed with violent criminals – rather than the slow and public strangulation by crane that Iran reserves for more serious crimes, like being sixteen and alone with a boy.
The injustices of the Alaeis’ imprisonment represent a laundry list of abuses common to the Iranian system: extended pre-trial detention without access to legal defense; secret proceedings and secret charges; incommunicado incarceration, and likely torture: all are common in the Islamic Republic. The suggestion that these particular individuals, as proud nationalists, were especially unlikely and inappropriate victims of the system only highlights its absurdities. Where justice is skewed, arbitrary and non-transparent, such seemingly farcical outcomes become far more likely. While the authorities doubtless insist that their evidence is sound, the regime’s record is such that any potential benefit of the doubt was ceded long ago. Nor should one overlook the implications of the attack on medical science, which comes only sixteen months after President Ahmadinejad called scientists “shining torches who shed light in order to remove darkness and the ambiguities around us in guiding humanity out of ignorance and perplexity.” In the future, scientists, including American ones that are “officially invited” to share their work with their Iranian counterparts, may decide that they are likely to pay far too high a price for sharing that “divine gift.”
Photo Credit: Flickr user Daniella Zalcman
