Everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal...
The following are the circumstances under which many political defendants have been tried in the courts of the Islamic Republic;
The defendants had no access to defense counsel in the courts, where no one could help or speak for them.
The defendants were not allowed to present any evidence in their defense.
The defendants were not told in advance what the charges against them were.
Their trials were held in secret.
Their cases were heard and tried by a single judge.
The individual judges presiding over the trials have often been young and inexperienced Mullahs who were lacking in proper legal training.
Their cases were often heard in trials that were summary in the extreme, with some cases having been completed within a matter of a few minutes- with the defendant's life being at stake.
"Confessions" extracted from the defendants under torture and ill-treatment have often been the sole evidence presented against the defendants at the trials.
The defendants who had been sentenced had no right of appeal or avenue of redress.
The following are two testimonies that illustrate the unfair nature of some of the trials that have been held in courts of the Islamic Republic:
"I was taken to a building called the court where there was a mullah behind a desk who must have been in his early twenties. There were four chairs on one side of the room and I sat down there with three other women. None of us had anything in common politically, each of us had been arrested for different reasons.
We gave our names one by one and were each asked which organization we had been arrested in connection with and what our political activities were. I said that I was arrested because they couldn't find my husband, and another woman said she had been at a party and had no political affiliations at all.
The court convened for no more than five minutes. There was no one else in the room, but there were interruptions the whole time. After five minutes we were told to leave the room and there were no further questions." From the testimony of a woman held in Evin and Gohar Dash prisons for months.
"I went to court and the Mullah read out a list of 25 charges against me. The Mullah said that I had confessed to all of them. The charges included belonging to Peykar, opposition to Khomeini and attempting to brainwash my students.
When the Mullah asked me if I had anything to say in my defense, I denied all the charges, saying they had been fabricated. The Mullah said he knew that my entire family were members of Peykar and that I deserved to be executed, but in order to show me that Islam is merciful he sentenced me to life imprisonment. He said there were witnesses who could testify against me, but when I asked to see them I was returned to my cell.
Later when I received the official notification of my sentence, it stated that I had been given 15 years' imprisonment." From the testimony of a man arrested in 1981.