Roxana Saberi’s case has by now become internationally known: The very photogenic Iranian-American journalist, who for the six years before her arrest in January had been working in Iran as a freelance reporter with different agencies including the BBC and the NPR, and after a closed-door summary ‘trial’, was sentenced to eight years in prison on espionage charges. Another case, that of Hossein Derakhshan, is equally indicative of how politicized the Iranian judiciary is. Derakhshan is known as the ‘godfather of blogging in Iran’ (under the blogger name, Hoder).
