Payam Derafshan

Age: 42

Activism/rights: Human rights lawyer

Status: Conditional release

Judicial status: 7 years imprisonment

Violations: Judicial harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention, lack of due process, unfair trial, denial of medical care, enforced disappearance, prolonged solitary confinement, cruel and unusual punishment

Payam Derafshan is a lawyer, human rights activist and Secretary of the Bar Association’s Commission on the Protection of Lawyers who has represented many political and minority cases. First arrested and detained for a short period in 2018, he was rearrested on 8 June 2020 and sentenced to two years imprisonment and a two year ban on practising law for “insulting the Supreme Leader” by Branch One of the Karaj Revolutionary Court.  On 6 July 2020, he was sentenced to two years and six months imprisonment by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court presided over by Judge Iman Afshari for “propaganda against the system, publishing lies with the intention of disturbing public opinion and carrying unauthorised explosives and shockers.” The trial took place in absentia due to Payam’s ill health. On 10 August 2020, lawyer Saeid Dehghan tweeted that Payam’s sentence had been upheld by Branch 36 of the Court of Appeals just two days after their 400 page submissions to the court. In Twitter thread on 17 October 2021, Saeid Dehghan exposed the shocking details of how Payam was transferred to a safe house following arrest and injected with an unknown shot that made him tremor and bite off half his own tongue, sectioning him in the Amin Abad psychiatric hospital, how he was subjected to electric shocks and beaten by Prison Organisation soldiers. He was tried in absentia by Judge Afshari and sentenced to two and a half years of imprisonment and a two-year ban on practicing law, which was upheld by the Court of Appeals. He went on medical furlough on 11 October 2020 and conditionally released in October 2021.