Adnan Hassanpour

Who is Adnan Hassanpour?

Adnan Hassanpour is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist who was sentenced to death in Iran in 2007 and reversed a year later. He is currently being re-tried on the capital charges of espionage and working with outlawed parties.

The sentence to death on Moharebeh charge in summer 2007 and later to 31 years in prison by the Appeals Court, has reduced again to 15 years imprisonment.

In April 2007, after being held for four months in detention, without access to a lawyer, Hassanpour was charged by Revolutionary Court prosecutors with “espionage,” “acting against national security,” and “active armed resistance against the state”, which is punishable by death under Iran’s Islamic Penal Code. The Supreme Court of Iran confirmed his death sentence on July 17, 2007, but it was reversed by the Head of the Judiciary on 3 September 2008 who sent it back to the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Sanandaj for review. According to his lawyer, Sirvan Houshmand, "the legal case against Hassanpour rests purely on evidence from interrogation reports obtained during his detention," lacking any other corroborating evidence, and interrogators in Iranian prisons, "routinely subject detainees to physical and psychological ill-treatment to obtain coerced confessions."