‘Serial Human Rights Abuser’ in Iran to Get 135 Lashes in Graft Case

A former high-ranking Iranian judicial official who came to symbolize Iran’s violent suppression of rights activists and journalists has been sentenced to 135 lashes in a corruption case.

The punishment of the former official, Saeed Mortazavi, who built his reputation as a feared judge and prosecutor in Tehran beginning in the early 2000s, was reported on Wednesday by the official Iranian news media.

It was unclear when, or even whether, the punishment would be carried out on Mr. Mortazavi, who has been described by Human Rights Watch as a “serial human rights abuser.”

Lashing or flogging, widely regarded as torture in much of the world, is still a common sentence in Iran for crimes like adultery, theft and alcohol consumption.

Mr. Mortazavi was sentenced in connection with what the state news media called his seizure and waste of public funds in 2012 and 2013 as the head of the Social Security Organization, a welfare agency that helps older adults and the unemployed.

As a judge, Mr. Mortazavi was known in Iran as the “butcher of the press” for his role in closing many reformist newspapers during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, whose policies of relative tolerance were despised by hard-core conservative clerics.

Mr. Mortazavi also was accused by Canada of involvement in what it has described as the torture and fatal beating in 2003 of an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist at Evin Prison in Tehran, an event caused a sharp deterioration in relations between the two countries.

The photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi, was seized for taking photographs outside the prison.

Mr. Mortazavi was perhaps best known in more recent years for what human rights advocates have described as his direct role in the imprisonment, torture and deaths of protesters angered over the disputed 2009 presidential election.

He was Tehran’s chief prosecutor at the time.

The election was won by the conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a political ally of Mr. Mortazavi’s, by what opponents called a suspiciously lopsided margin that smacked of fraud.

In 2010, a parliamentary report concluded that Mr. Mortazavi shared responsibility for the deaths of three protesters in a police prison facility.

He was acquitted two years ago of charges related to their deaths but was barred from public office for five years.

Rights activists on Wednesday were critical of the punishment in the corruption case, describing it as a barbaric sentence that distracted from what they called Mr. Mortazavi’s real crimes.

Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group, called it “a total whitewash for a person who is implicated in gross corruption and graft as well as torture and deaths in custody of protesters in 2009.”

Mr. Ghaemi said Mr. Mortazavi “could probably buy his way out of the flogging sentence by paying a fee.”

Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said “even a serial human rights abuser like Saeed Mortazavi, who has had a brutal hand in the persecution of countless Iranians, does not deserve corporal punishment.”

Ms. Whitson said lashing “sadly undermines and distracts from the merits of the charges against him.”

###

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/world/middleeast/iran-human-rights-abuser-135-lashes-corruption.html?_r=0