Mortazavi has long been a very controversial figure in Iran. In 2009, at the time of the post-election protests, he was the Tehran prosecutor.
A later Majlis report said he ordered 147 protesters sent to Kahrizak prison, which was a drug detention center and not meant to be used for political crimes.
At least three of the prisoners held there died from beatings, although Mortazavi said they had all died of meningitis.
Mortazavi said he sent the arrested men there because Evin prison was full. But the warden at Evin testified that he had lots of open space.
Under a cloud, Mortazavi was dismissed by the Judiciary in 2009. But President Ahmadi-nejad immediately appointed him to head the country’s anti-smuggling campaign. Then, just before Now Ruz, Labor Minister Abdol-Reza Shaikholeslami named Mortazavi to head the Social Security Organization, which runs many welfare programs as well as the national pension system.
That appointment set off a fury in the Majlis, in just one of a string of angry confrontations between the Majlis and the Ahmadi-nejad Administration.
After talk of impeaching the labor minister subsided, it was decided to take the issue of Mortazavi’s appointment to the Court of Administrative Justice.
That court ruled Monday that Mortazavi’s appointment while under investigation for the Kahrizak deaths was illegal.
Hojatoleslam Mohammad-Jafar Montazeri, the chief of the court, told the Mehr news agency, “On Monday morning, the order of Saeed Mortazavi’s appointment was revoked by the court because Mortazavi’s appointment to head the Social Security Organization violated the law.”
The Kahrizak scandal would probably never have come to public light but for the fact that one of the dead men was the son of a prominent conservative. The father picked up his son’s body and found it was badly bruised, several teeth were knocked out and his face was crushed. The father then went public and approached many conservative friends so that the issue even made it to the desk of the Supreme Leader, news reports have said.
It isn’t known why Ahmadi-nejad has been adamant in protecting Mortazavi, who was in the Judiciary and never in the president’s chain of command before the scandal.