Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who has been detained in Iran for more than a year on charges including espionage, has been convicted.
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“President Obama’s gamble that a nuclear deal would lead to a more responsible Iran has already failed”.
The Washington Post on Monday slammed the conviction of its reporter Jason Rezaian in Iran as an “outrageous injustice” and said it was working with his family and lawyer to prepare a quick appeal.
Later, Ali Rezaian told CNN that his brother had heard about his own conviction “on Iranian TV”. Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani hinted last month at the possibility of an exchange for Iranian prisoners in America. Rezaian had 20 days to appeal the verdict, the Iranian news service ISNA cited a judiciary spokesman as saying. He holds both American and Iranian citizenship. “It is disgusting to reward a country that so brazenly violates worldwide law and abuses our fellow citizens”, they said.
On Monday, the Washington Post’s executive editor Martin Baron said the announced guilty verdict “represents an outrageous injustice”. “Iran has behaved unconscionably throughout this case”, Mr Baron said in a statement, “but never more so than with this indefensible decision by a revolutionary court to convict an innocent journalist of serious crimes after a proceeding that unfolded in secret, with no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing”.
Post officials said Rezaian had been used as a bargaining chip.
Rezaian has been detained in Iran for almost 15 months on charges including espionage, but it’s not clear which charges Rezaian was convicted of or what the sentence might be. If Iran, which recently secured a nuclear agreement with the USA and other western nations, wants to become more open to the world, it must respect global press freedoms. Unfortunately, this is not surprising given that this process has been opaque and incomprehensible from the start. “Regardless of whether there has been a conviction or not, we continue to call for the government of Iran to drop all charges against Jason and release him immediately”.
Rezaian’s lawyer, wife and mother were “provided no further information” about the verdict “under the guise of a translator not being available” when they went to court Monday to seek clarification, his brother Ali Rezaian said.
The Obama administration came under strong criticism for not linking their fate to the Iran nuclear deal, although it said officials raised the matter frequently on the sidelines of the nuclear talks.
In 2009, U.S. Soldier Bowe Bergdahl was held captive by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network in Afghanistan for five years.
He said the family has been in touch with the State Department “on and off”. “After so many months in solitary, he’s suffering from depression, he’s lost weight, and we don’t really know exactly what his medical condition is, because he doesn’t have access to a hospital where we can get information about his condition”.
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“I think it was the right strategy to pursue”, Kerry said, adding that the families of the captive Americans understood it would not be wise to do so otherwise.
