Iran: Sweden protests after the death sentence of an Iranian-Swedish dissident
Habib Chaab, an Iranian-Swedish dissident, during his trial on January 18, 2022, in Tehran.
© MAJID AZAD / AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
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The Iranian Judiciary announced on Sunday the confirmation of the death penalty against an Iranian-Swedish dissident, detained since 2020 in Iran, according to the justice agency.
For its part, Sweden condemns the sentence.
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Habib Chaab's death sentence for corruption on earth, management and leadership of a rebel group and designing and executing numerous terrorist operations has been approved by the Supreme Court," Mizan Online reported
. .
Leader of the ASMLA group (Arab Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz), considered a terrorist movement by the Iranian authorities, Habib lived in exile in Sweden for 14 years before disappearing in Turkey in October 2020.
Kidnapped, according to the Turkish authorities, reappears in November 2020 in a video published by Iran where he confesses to having participated in an attack against a parade of the Revolutionary Guards in the separatist province of Khuzestan in 2018.
A confession obtained according to Amnesty International under torture.
Sweden, of which he is a citizen, has taken steps to offer him consular assistance, but without result, because Iran does not recognize dual nationality.
During his two years of detention, the Swedish authorities were never allowed to visit Habib Chaab in prison, nor to attend his trial, recalls our correspondent in Stockholm, Carlotta
Morteo
.
"
The death penalty is an inhuman and irreversible punishment and Sweden, like the rest of the EU, condemns its application in all circumstances
," said Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstro.
On trial since January 2022 for "
terrorism
" and above all the spread of "
corruption on Earth
", justice announced on December 6 the death sentence for this man in his fifties, according to the media.
"
Habib Chaab's death sentence is confirmed and final
," Mizan Online said.
Another Iranian-Swede on death row
His death sentence is undoubtedly a response from Tehran to the conviction, in the summer of 2022, by a Swedish court of a former Iranian prison official, Hamid Noury.
Life imprisonment was requested against this man considered key in the massacres of political prisoners in 1988. Iran had described this trial as illegal, and the verdict as "
political
" but without effect.
Since Swedish courts can judge foreign citizens, as soon as they are arrested on Swedish soil, for crimes against international law.
Another Iranian-Swedish is now on death row in Iran, the researcher Ahmadreza Djalali, accused of collaborating with the Israeli intelligence services.
Tehran had provoked a wave of international indignation after executing in January a former defense official, the Iranian-British Alireza Akbari, convicted of espionage.
On March 1, Germany expelled two diplomats stationed in Berlin in protest at the death sentence of 67-year-old Iranian-German dissident Jamshid Sharmahd.
He was accused of having participated in an attack against a mosque in Shiraz, in the south of Iran, which killed 14 people in April 2008.
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