Iran’s Supreme Court Rejects Second Request for Retrial of Kurdish Political Prisoner Pakhshan Azizi

On April 5, 2025, Maziyar Tatayi, one of the attorneys representing Pakhshan Azizi, a Kurdish political prisoner currently held in Evin Prison, announced that the Supreme Court of Iran has rejected the second request for a retrial filed by her legal team.

Tatayi stated via the social media platform X that the Supreme Court dismissed the retrial request without even reviewing the original case file, labeling the legal arguments presented by the defense as “groundless.” He added:

“Such a conclusion without examining the case file contradicts due process and undermines legal rights. Unfortunately, the court did not request or review the file at all.”

Previous Legal Actions and Death Sentence

On February 7, 2025, attorney Amir Raisian had announced that the first retrial request filed with Branch 9 of the Supreme Court had also been rejected, with the verdict formally delivered to her lawyers on February 8, 2025.

Earlier, on January 10, 2025, Raisian confirmed that Branch 39 of the Supreme Court had upheld Azizi’s death sentence, initially issued in August 2024 by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Iman Afshari.

Azizi, a journalist and social work graduate, had been sentenced to death on charges of “armed rebellion (baghi)”, allegedly due to her membership in a Kurdish opposition party. The same court also sentenced her to four years in prison for “membership in groups opposing the state.”

 Due Process Violations and Family Sentencing

During eight months of detention and interrogation, Pakhshan Azizi was denied access to legal counsel and family visits.

Her trial was held in June 2024, and the verdict was formally delivered to her lawyer on July 23, 2024.

In a related case, three of her family members—her father Aziz Azizi, her sister Parshang Azizi, and her brother-in-law Hossein Abbasi—were each sentenced to one year of imprisonment on charges of “assisting the accused in evading justice.”

These sentences were upheld by the Tehran Court of Appeals on September 26, 2024.

 Open Letter from Prison and Previous Arrests

On July 21, 2024, Azizi published an open letter from Evin Prison, titled “Concealing the Truth and Its Alternative”. In the letter, she describes the suffering of being a Kurdish woman in the Islamic Republic, and details torture and inhumane conditions she endured during solitary confinement.

In December 2023, she was transferred from Ward 209 of Evin Prison—run by the Intelligence Ministry—to the general women’s ward, after four months of intensive interrogation.

Azizi was originally arrested on August 4, 2023, in Tehran by security forces and taken to Ward 209.

This is not her first arrest: in November 2009, she was detained during a student protest at the University of Tehran against political executions in Kurdistan.

She was released on bail after four months in pretrial detention, later left Iran, and had been residing in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in recent years before her latest arrest.