Inside Iran’s Revolutionary Courts

In the living room of their flat in Calgary, Canada, Shoreh Roshani and her mother Parvin are watching a flickering video. Shoreh has her arm around her mother, and both women are weeping softly.
The grainy footage, which only recently came to light, is of a trial in 1981 and shows the final hours in the life of Shoreh's father, Sirus.
Shortly after it ended, he and the other six defendants were taken away and shot.
Their crime was to have been leading members of a religious minority called the Bahais - heretics, in the eyes of the rulers who had swept to power two years earlier in Iran's Islamic revolution
Former members of the Shah's government were the first targets of their revolutionary justice, but the Bahais were also high on the list.

Iranian Revolutionary Justice, directed by Mark Williams for BBC Persian, will be shown on BBC World on Saturday 17 October at 04:10 and 15:10 GMT, and on Sunday 18 October at 09:10 and 21:10 GMT

After Roshani and the other Bahai leaders were seized, the only news that emerged was a letter from another member of the group, Kamran Samimi to his wife Farideh.
"Don't worry," it said. "We are all happy together and we are being treated well."
But two weeks later they were dead.

In the early days of the Revolutionary Court, trials were usually held in secret, with no defence lawyers and no jury. Some lasted no more than a few minutes.
"There was no need to investigate if people had committed a crime," says Iranian academic Dr Majid Mohammadi. "Just being against the regime was enough."
In the case of the Bahai leadership the proceedings lasted for a couple of hours. The defendants can be seen in the footage sitting on a row of chairs facing the judge, who can be heard constantly berating and interrupting them as they try to respond to a series of Kafkaesque charges.

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