On Tuesday, August 27, 2024, Matin Hassani, a young protester who suffered eye injuries during the November 2019 protests in Iran, was arrested and transferred to Bukan Central Prison to begin serving his sentence. Hassani was convicted by Branch 101 of the Second Criminal Court in Bukan and sentenced to 31 months in prison on charges of “inciting people to war and mass killing with the intent to disturb national security” and “propaganda against the regime.
The court hearing for Hassani’s case took place on May 16, 2024, presided over by a judge in the same court. Hassani had been summoned to the court on May 6, 2024, through a written notice, which led to his subsequent conviction and imprisonment.
Human rights organizations describe the judicial process in Iran as unfair, as detainees of nationwide protests are deprived of the right to choose their own lawyer based on Iranian laws. Court-appointed lawyers often do not provide a proper defense for the accused and frequently align with the prosecutor against the defendant.
The protests in Iran in 2019 began on November 15 in protest against the rise in gasoline prices. These protests quickly spread to over 191 cities. In these protests, more than 1,500 people were killed by the Revolutionary Guards, police, security forces, and plainclothes individuals. The number of injured in these protests exceeded 4,000. The number of those arrested during the demonstrations also reached 12,000. Between November 15th and 18th, 2019, over 70 individuals underwent eye surgery due to being hit by pellet bullets, at one of the specialized eye hospitals in Iran.
During the nationwide protests in 2022 in Iran, more than 600 protesters had their eyes injured and lost one or both of their eyes due to deliberate shootings by security forces. The Iran Human Rights Monitor (Iran HRM) stated in a report released after 5 months of the start of the protests in 2022: that considering the volume of reports related to protesters being shot in the head and faces by security forces, leading to a significant number of citizens being blinded, it considers this action of security entities crushing the protests as “systematic.”
In a report published in the New York Times on November 29, 2024, the ophthalmologists of three major Tehran hospitals; Farabi, Rasoul Akram, and Labafinejad, have estimated that since from the onset of protests, they have admitted and treated a total of over 500 patients with severely damaged eyes. Of course, many of the injured cannot afford to pay for the operation and they may not have performed the surgery and have not been registered. This was the statistic two months ago, and until today, with the passing of 5 months since the protests, at least 600 people have lost one or both eyes.
