Professor Reza Eslami (pictured), an Iranian-Canadian national, has been given a 7-year prison sentence in Iran.
The “crime” of Eslami, who works at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University, was attendance at a training course in the Czech Republic.
A Revolutionary Court convicted the academic of “cooperating with an enemy state”. Judge Abolghassem Salavati also banned Eslami from teaching and leaving the country.
Eslami was arrested in May over his participation in the law training course, organized by a Czech NGO that receives funds from the US.
In an audio recording from prison, he said the charges were “baseless” as his academic work is free of “political, security, and foreign-relations issues”.
People close to Eslami said he had no contact with anyone from the US Government.
The Revolutionary Guards have detained a series of foreign and dual-national academics in recent years. They include:
*Iranian-Swedish medical doctor Ahmedreza Djalali of the Karolinska Institute, arrested in April 2016 and facing the death penalty
*French-Iranian anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah of Paris’s Sciences Po University, arrested in June 2019 and given temporary prison leave in October
*Adelkhah’s partner Roland Marchal, a sociologist at Sciences Po, released in a prisoner swap last March
*Anglo-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert of the University of Melbourne, a specialist in Islamic Studies, seized in September 2018 and released in a prisoner exchange in November
*Chinese-American historian Xiyue Wang of Princeton University, imprisoned from August 2016 until a prisoner swap in December 2019
