Iranian of the Day

ICHRI: In an interview with the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, the sister of Saeed Malekpour, a web developer on death row who has been in prison since 2008, said that his clemency request has been denied. “Saeed’s lawyer [Mahmoud Alizadeh Tabatabaee] asked for clemency for him a while back, but unfortunately this request was denied by judicial authorities. I don’t know a lot about the process of this clemency request, just that his lawyer said that his request for clemency for Saeed has been denied. Saeed himself has not requested clemency yet,” said Maryam Malekpour.

Maryam Malekpour told the Campaign that her family had been very hopeful that an Eid-al-Fitr clemency, given at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, would have also included Saeed Malekpour. “We were very hopeful to see Saeed among those prisoners who received a pardon on the occasion of Edi-al-Fitr, but, unfortunately, this didn’t happen. Now our only hope is that the Head of the Judiciary has not yet signed the execution orders, which remain in the Judiciary’s Sentence Enforcement Unit. We don’t know whether the fact that the sentence has remained in this state for a whole year should make us happy or worried. We remain hopeful for Saeed to be forgiven and pardoned,” she told the Campaign.

Security forces arrested Canadian resident Saeed Malekpour, 36, when he returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his ailing father. He appeared on Iranian state TV in 2009 and confessed to charges raised against him. In October 2010 he was sentenced to death on charges of “insulting Islamic sanctities” for alleged “management of pornographic websites.” The Supreme Court overturned the sentence in November 2011 because of deficiencies in investigations and insufficient evidence, and forwarded his case to the Revolutionary Court. Even so, the Supreme Court upheld his death sentence on January 30, 2012, and forwarded the ruling to the Judiciary’s Sentence Enforcement Unit.

Related articles:

* Saeed Malekpour Under Renewed Pressure to Make Televised
* Malekpour Family Allowed Visit After Three Months
* International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran – Revoke Execution Sentence of Web Programmer

After the Supreme Court upheld Malekpour’s death sentence, he was put under renewed pressure to make televised confessions. His sister told the Campaign during earlier interviews that despite immense pressure, Saeed Malekpour refused to make confessions. After his refusal to confess, he was not allowed to see or contact his family for three months and his family had no information about him during this time.

“Saeed is still inside [the Revolutionary Guard’s] Ward 2-A, and four years after his arrest, he has not yet been transferred to the General Ward. Even so, thank God he is in a good psychological state. He shares a cell with another individual and is not alone. He is allowed visitations once every two weeks and thank God his mental state is good and his physical problems have improved a lot, too,” said Maryam Malekpour.