Kurdish political prisoners Pezhman Fatehi, Mohsen Mazloum, Mohammad Faramarzi, and Vafa Azarbar, who have been sentenced to death, have had their request for a retrial rejected by the Supreme Court, according to their lawyer, Masoud Shamsnejad.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on 16 January, Shamsnejad said: “The request for a retrial on behalf of my clients Vafa Azarbar, Mohammad Faramarzi, Mohsen Mazloum and Pezhman Fatehi was rejected due to the non-submission of the first instance and appeal verdicts, which is a common occurrence in security cases where lawyers are not provided with relevant verdicts.
Shamsnejad had previously criticised the trial process as “unjust” and “unfair”, saying: “Since I accepted the legal representation of the families of these four prisoners, neither my clients nor I have had access to our rights, and my legal representation has remained only on paper and in vain.”
Despite the legal restrictions preventing access to their case file, Shamsnejad filed a retrial request on 9 January 2023, hoping to halt the executions and have the case reviewed.
The four members of the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan have been forcibly disappeared since their arrest by the Ministry of Intelligence on 22 June 2023 in a village in Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan Province.
Since their arrest, their families and lawyers have had no contact or meetings with them and their fate and place of detention remain unknown.
They were sentenced to death about two months ago in an unfair trial by Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran on charges of “spying for Israel”, a sentence recently upheld by the Supreme Court.
Following the recent broadcast of their forced confessions on state television and the increased possibility of their execution, some members of their families protested outside Evin Prison on 14 January.
