January 22, 2021
Iranian-Canadian professor has been hailed into court in Iran for “collaborating with a hostile government,” a more modest charge than espionage although it amounts to the same.
The trial against Reza Eslami, a professor at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University, got underway October 20, and, according to his lawyer, “several sessions” will follow.
The case is being heard by Judge AbolQassem Salavati, who regularly handles the cases of political prisoners. Eslami, a dual national Iranian-Canadian citizen, is a law graduate of McGill University in Montreal and a member of the scientific board of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran.
Prior to his arrest, he taught human rights and environmental law at Shahid Beheshti Univ. He was arrested May 11 by Ministry of Intelligence agents and transferred to a cell in Ward 209 of Evin Prison.
They kept him in detention, and, a few days later, on May 19, Gholam-Hossain Esmaili, a spokesperson for the Judiciary, confirmed Eslami’s arrest at a news conference. The comments followed widespread protests by students, university professors and staff over his arrest.
A major complaint was that he was arrested on campus. But the spokesman denied that: “The arrest was not made at the university and the presence of officers at the university was due to the fact that, after his arrest, he confessed in interrogations that part of his criminal documents were kept in his office at the university on his laptop. So, they went there and removed the documents from his office.
When a person claims that criminal documents are in his office, shouldn’t we take them? Or should we not defuse a bomb?” In late July, the Evin Prison Prosecutor’s Office charged Eslami with collaborating with the “hostile” United States government.
At the same time, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that the academic had been arrested for attending a training course in the Czech Republic. Iranian security officials claim that the group conducting the training course was in contact with the US government, the news agency reported.
Reza Eslami is a prolific author, and has published more than 50 articles on human rights both in Iran and internationally. Between 2001 and 2019, he published 17 books on the subject, IranWire reported.