Joshua Fattal, 29, and Shane Bauer, 28, were detained more than two years ago as they were hiking along the Iran-Iraq border in the Kurdish region of Iraq. A third hiker, Sarah Shourd, 32, was released on bail of $500,000 last September.
The three hikers have denied the charges of espionage. Shourd has said they were ordered to approach by an armed Iranian guard, who then told them they had been in Iraq when they saw him but entered Iran when they came to him as directed.
In the weeks leading up to the sentencing Saturday, several Iranian officials made public comments that had raised hopes about their early release. Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi had expressed hope that the trial of the hikers “will finally lead to their freedom.” President Ahmadi-nejad himself had urged the courts to make a compassionate ruling.
The eight-year sentence, therefore, came as a surprise to many. The two men received three years, the maximum, for illegal entry, and five years, versus a maximum of 10, for espionage. The court said the case against Shourd is still open.
The key question being debated after the sentencing is why the court did what it did.
Some believe the sentence may have been a way for the Iranian courts to express their independence from political pressure—even to stick a thumb in the eye of Ahmadi-nejad.
“The judiciary doesn’t want to hand the government any victories or to be dictated to by the government,” one Iranian political analyst told the Christian Science Monitor.
Some believe the ruling was meant as a check to the power of the beleaguered Ahmadi-nejad, who has lost favor among Iran’s political establishment after a recent tussle with the Supreme Leader.
Another theory maintains that Iran is using the two American hikers as a bargaining chip to free 10 Iranians that Iran maintains are in American prisons. One such Iranian, a woman with twin daughters, was sentenced in a Florida court in 2009 to five years for involvement in an attempt to smuggle 3,500 night-vision goggles to Iran in violation of the US trade embargo.
Ahmad Bakhshayesh, a political science professor at Tehran’s Azad University, told the Associated Press the sentence meant “Iran is trying to relay a tit-for-tat message to Washington that we sentence Americans as you did it against Iranian nationals in the US.”
Some believe the sentences could be a reaction to a letter by 92 US senators to President Obama urging him to impose sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank as a major extension of sanctions.
Yet others suspect the sentence is just a temporary act of venom to be followed by the release of the pair. This view maintains that since Iran was expected to show clemency as a humanitarian gesture, delivering a harsher sentence will make future gestures seem all the more magnanimous. It was recalled that two years ago, Iranian-American Roxana Saberi was also sentenced to eight years for espionage, a sentence that was dropped on appeal. She was then freed and went home.
According to Iranian law, the sentence can be appealed within 20 days, and the lawyer for the hikers, Masud Shafii, has said he will lodge an appeal.
A lot of attention has also been focused on the mothers of the detained hikers, who have been appealing for clemency.
Shane and Josh “have never posed any threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran, its government or its people,” the hikers’ families said in a statement, appealing for “compassion” so the men could return to their families.
Similar pleas for their release have been made in recent weeks by the boxer Mohammad Ali and by the singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam, both Western converts to Islam.
One point on which just about everyone agrees is that the case is political. The lawyer, Shafii, said that the prosecution never even introduced any evidence to back up the charge of espionage. The only evidence introduced related to the illegal entry charge.
Shourd has said that after two months of questioning, her interrogator said the case was dragging on so
long because it was “political” and a “tug of war between two countries.”
Bauer and Fattal were tried by the politically charged Revolutionary Court system, which has been accused of failing to meet international or even Iranian standards of jurisprudence.
Shafii, the lawyer, said that by not announcing the results within a week after the end of hearings, the court violated legal procedures. The sentence was not announced until three weeks after the final court session.
“Once the judge announces the end of the trial, he must return a verdict right there or, at most, take a week to do so. Therefore, in this case, I have to say the judge is in violation,” he said. The delay suggested to many that the Judiciary had been tussling over how to resolve the case.
“In such sensitive cases they are so concerned about the content of the verdict that they do not pay attention to the administrative issues and delays in such cases are not unprecedented,” Shafii said.