By Safa Haeri

Pro-reform Iranian newspapers, international human rights organisations and exiled dissidents have all expressed outrage this week at death sentences passed by a revolutionary court against four students who led anti-government demonstrations in July. They called upon Iranian authorities either to immediately release them or to grant them a fair and public trial.

In an interview with the pro-conservative daily Jomhouri Eslami last week, Hojatoleslam Qolamhossein Rahbarpour, the head of the Tehran Department of Islamic Courts, revealed that four students had been sentenced to death and that the Islamic High Court had already confirmed two of the verdicts.

He also reiterated that "sufficient evidence" had been found to confirm that 13 Iranian Jews arrested last February in Shiraz were indeed spying for Israel.

Rahbarpour did not provide the students' identities, the date of their trial or the specific charges against them beyond their having participated in the July protests. However, he claimed that the students had confessed to "crimes" against the state.

In the aftermath of the student unrest, state television broadcast "confessions" of student union leader, Manuchehr Mohammadi, his deputy Qolamreza Mohajeri-Nezhad and member Maryam Shansi "admitting" to having "coordinated their activities with counter-revolutionary agents and organisations", and having received money and fax machines from them. These charges are punishable by death under Iranian law.

Four other members of the Iranian People's Party -- Khosrow Sayf, Ahmad Namazi, Farzin Mokhber and Mehran Mir Abdol-Baghi -- were also detained in connection with the demonstrations.

Local newspapers said Rahbarpour's revelations were in line with the conservative assault on reformists. They also noted that the sentences were in complete contradiction to a report filed late last month by the Supreme Council for National Security (SCNS) that condemned the police, plain-clothed members of the hardline Ansari Hezbollah group and units of the Intelligence Ministry for the role they played in setting the stage for the student unrest.

"Rahbarpour's statements are part of the conservative campaign against the report of the [SNSC] investigating committee, which was somewhat lenient on the students," said an editorial in the pro-reform daily Arya.

"The announcement in an interview of death sentences against four of those accused of inciting riots was a shock for public opinion which had been kept in the dark about the court proceedings," said another commentary in Akhbar Al-Eqtesad (the daily newspaper that has taken the place of Neshat which was shut down last week upon orders from the conservative-controlled judiciary).

"Verdicts passed in secret by the Islamic courts are leading to more questions and undermine further the independence of the judiciary," commented Mehrangis Kar, a prominent lawyer and human rights campaigner in Iran.

Karim Lahiji, president of the Paris-based Iranian League of Human Rights, noted that despite the recent change at the top of the Iranian judiciary, this latter continued to follow the same path "as if nothing had ever changed".

Noting that trials by the Islamic Revolutionary courts are always held in secret, that pronouncing sentence usually takes a "few minutes" and that the accused have no right to a lawyer, Lahiji observed that this was the first time the public had learned through the press of unidentified people being sentenced to death. "How in such circumstances can one talk about rule of law and respect for the law?" he said. Sadeq Saba, a commentator on Iranian affairs, gleaned from Rahbarpour's interview that the aim of the conservatives was to warn students that the same fate awaits them if they renew unrest when they go back to campus in a few days time.