A five-year prison sentence delivered to Pastor Matthias Haghnejad was upheld on 25 February without a hearing, after Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei reportedly permitted the judge to bypass court procedures, according to CSW\u2019s sources.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pastor Haghnejad was initially sentenced following a short trial on 23 September 2019. Eight other members of the Church of Iran also received five year sentences. All of them were convicted of \u201cendangering state security\u201d and \u201cpromoting Zionism\u201d and are currently being held in Evin Prison in Tehran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pastor Haghnejad was arrested<\/a> by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard after a church service on 10 February 2019, while Shahrouz Eslamdoust, Babak Hosseinzadeh, Behnam Akhlaghi, Mehdi Khatibi, Mohammad Vafadar, Kamal Naamanian, Hossein Kadivar (Elisha) and Khalil Dehghanpour were detained following a series of arrests in Rasht<\/a> in early 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Numerous legal irregularities have been observed during their detention, including pressure from presiding Judge Mohammed Moghisheh<\/a> to force some of the detainees into replacing their lawyer with a court appointed legal representative. At another hearing, Judge Moghisheh, who is notorious for miscarriages of justice, asserted that the Bible was false and called the men \u201capostates.\u201d<\/a> During the hearing on 23 September<\/a>, the defendants\u2019 lawyer was allowed to speak briefly; however, Judge Moghisheh allegedly did not respond to his statement and sources report that it appeared he had already made his decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CSW\u2019s Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said: \u201cWe are deeply concerned by the lack of due process in Pastor Matthias Haghnejad\u2019s case, and that of the eight other members of the Church of Iran, who have been sentenced alongside him. CSW believes that the charges against them are without basis and continues to call for their immediate and unconditional release.\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n CSW sources have also raised concerns that the Iranian authorities are not taking appropriate measures to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in prisons. According to media reports<\/a>, the husband of British prisoner Nazanin Zargari-Radcliffe has said that she is suffering symptoms associated with the virus, a claim which has been denied by the Iranian ambassador to the UK. Christian prisoner Ramiel Bet-Tamraz<\/a>, who was sentenced to four months in prison for \u201cspreading propaganda against the system through membership of illegal house churches\u201d, was released from prison a few days early on 26 February, amidst concerns about the speed with which the Coronavirus was spreading inside Iran\u2019s prison system.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A five-year prison sentence delivered to Pastor Matthias Haghnejad was upheld on 25 February without a hearing, after Irans Supreme Leader.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43299,"template":"","categories":[],"regions":[148,145],"class_list":["post-29162","press","type-press","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","regions-iran","regions-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/press\/29162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/press"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/press"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/press\/29162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39746,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/press\/29162\/revisions\/39746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29162"},{"taxonomy":"regions","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.csw.org.uk\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/regions?post=29162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}