Maryam Akbari Monfared was verbally summoned to the Evin Courthouse on Wednesday, June 10, to be arraigned with charges levelled in a new case recently filed against her.
Ms. Akbari Monfared refused to appear in the courthouse as a gesture of protest to her lack of access to legal counsel and the authorities’ failure to send her a written summons, as well as their inaction towards the coronavirus outbreak in prisons.
It is said that Maryam Akbari Monfared is charged with chanting slogans on the night of February 11, 2020, the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution. Branch 2 of the Interrogation Department of the Evin Courthouse presided by Judge Haji Moradi is in charge of the new case fabricated against her.
Earlier, on June 7, the same branch had summoned and arraigned political prisoner Atena Daemi with the charge of “disrupting the prison’s order through chanting slogans against the Islamic Republic.” Ms. Daemi rejected the said charges after the court session.
Imprisoned since December 2009, Akbari-Monfared, 50, is eligible for release after serving more than 10 years of her 15-year prison sentence without furlough, but the court has refused to approve her petitions.
Her conviction, according to Amnesty International, is solely based on the fact that she had made phone calls to her relatives, who are members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), and had visited them once in Iraq.
Maryam Akbari Monfared’s sister Roghieh and brother Abdolreza were among several thousand political prisoners, serving their sentences were cut off from the outside world in July 1988, and subsequently executed in secret and without trial. They were then dumped into mass unmarked graves.
Most of those executed were political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, who had already spent several years in prison, serving the sentences they had been given by the Revolutionary Courts. Some had already completed their sentences but had not been released because they had refused to make statements of repentance.
