Court of Appeal upholds the sentence of 6 years imprisonment for Suha Mortezaei
10-February-2021
Category: Students
Breathing in Confinement: The prison sentence for Suha Mortezaei, the student activist and former secretary of the Tehran University Guild Council, was upheld in Tehran Court of Appeals- Branch 54. Suha Mortezaei had previously been sentenced to six years in prison by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.
According to Breathing in Confinement, the news organ of the Prisoners’ Rights League in Iran, Suha Mortezaei, a graduate student at the University of Tehran who has been barred from studying in doctoral degree, had previously been arrested during the November 2019 protests and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Ms. Mortezaei’s lawyer, Mustafa Nili, confirmed the news on his Twitter page. He wrote: “Branch 54 of the Court of Appeals, based in the Revolutionary Court, upheld the verdict issued by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court, which had sentenced Suha Mortezaei to six years in prison on charges of conspiracy to act against national security. Sitting at the university to protest the denial of the right to study in doctoral degree is the main evidence the verdict has referred to.”
During the nationwide protests, on November 17, 1998, Suha Mortezaei had been summoned to the entrance of the Fatemieh dormitory of the University of Tehran via a text message. From where, she was transferred to Evin Prison’s Ward 2-A, the IRGC Intelligence Detention Center. A while later, Ms. Mortezaei, being unable to provide financial inability to provide the bail of 500 million Tomans, went on a hunger strike. And on December 31, 2019, on her tenth day of hunger strike, she was transferred to Qarchak Prison in Varamin. She finally ended his hunger strike after twenty-two days on Sunday, January 12, 2020. Ms. Mortezaei was temporarily released from Qarchak prison in Varamin on January 22, 2020, on bail of 500 million Tomans, awaiting the trial to be finalized.
This student activist was previously barred from studying doctorate in political science and international relations, despite ranking 10th in the doctoral exam. The phrase “defect in the file” is written in her doctoral exam transcript. In October 2019, after being denied the right of studying in doctoral degree, and after her eforts failed to resolve the problem through the administrative process, carrying a protest placard, she held a solo sit-in in front of the Central Library of the University of Tehran for a period of twenty-one days. Following the sit-in, university officials threatened to cancel the session where she was supposed defend her thesis. The officials as well contacted Ms. Mortezaei’s mother, and pressured her to admit her daughter to a psychiatric hospital.
Suha Mortezaei, a master graduate student in the humanities and former secretary of the University of Tehran’s union council, had previously been detained by security forces for following up on the situation of the detained students during the December 2017 uprisings. In September 2019, she was sentenced by Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court of Tehran to six years in prison and two years of being barred of membership in political parties and groups. The sentence was eventually reduced to one year in prison on appeal.
In addition, Ms. Mortezaei had previously been detained in a chains of arrests in mid January 2015, along with a number of student activists from Amirkabir and Allameh Tabatabai Universities in Tehran, and after around 2 months, she was released in February of the same year.