‘There is no justice in this system, not an ounce of it’

Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian has been held in a prison in Tehran for 10 months. For most of that time, the 39-year-old Iranian American was held in solitary confinement, hardly had any contact with his family and didn’t know why he was being held. In April, the Iranian government announced that the Post’s Tehran bureau chief was facing espionage charges.

Rezaian appeared in court Tuesday, as did his journalist wife Yeganeh Salehi, and another suspect, both of whom are out on bail. The trial is expected to last only a couple of days or weeks, and much to the concern of his family, the Washington Post and the State Department, the proceedings were closed to the public. Tuesday's court session lasted just two hours before being recessed to begin again later, according to Iranian state media reports.

Among those who had hoped to attend: His mother and his brother, Ali Rezaian, who has led a Change.org campaign to free Rezaian that has more than 435,000 signatures.

Jason Rezaian has met with his lawyer only once — for a mere 90 minutes. Recently, Jason’s mother traveled to Iran and was able to have a face-to-face meeting with her son. According to Ali Rezaian, “there were two interrogators there in the room. They didn’t want to be known. They had masks on. They were there in the room, spoke English, and were able to understand what they were saying.”

As to whether any of Jason’s actions as a journalist might have led to accusations that he is a spy, Ali says “there hadn’t been issues in the past. There were specific rules and processes to become accredited as a journalist in Iran. Jason did those things, followed the rules and had good relations with the folks that do the accreditation.”

Douglas Jehl, foreign editor for the Washington Post and Jason’s boss, also rebuts the charges against him. “There’s no basis whatsoever to believe Jason was doing anything illegal. He was doing his job as a journalist, he was gathering information and talking to people, he was bouncing that information off of others, but the idea that any of it was untoward or espionage is simply ludicrous,” says Jehl.

Zahir Janmohamed, a close friend of Rezaian, followed the trial from the US. The two men got to know each other back in 2012, when Rezaian was preparing to go to Iran to become a reporter.

"We had a lot in common,” Janmohamed recalls, “we both wanted to show the countries of our ancestry with greater depth and greater nuance."

Rezaian, Janmohamed says, did add nuance to the reporting that was done on Iran. But it was all short-lived.

"Iran is unfortunately very paranoid … and while there is an element in Iran, especially among the youth who want to normalize relations with the US, who want Iran to open up and become more transparent, there are still some hardliners,” he explains.

To Janmohamed, Rezaian's arrest is "completely unfair."

“I miss him and I think about him all the time and I can’t believe this is still happening,” he says.

Jehl, from the Post, has also been pressing the Iranian government for access to the trial, but without response. “I personally have sought a visa to return to Iran as soon as Jason was arrested. We renewed our request on several occasions, renewed it again this week. I think it’s important that the Post be there to witness the trial to provide support to his family, to be able to confirm it proceeds in an open and fair fashion,” says Jehl.

Jehl's boss, Post executive editor Martin Baron, put it more bluntly in a statement. "There is no justice in this system, not an ounce of it, and yet the fate of a good, innocent man hangs in the balance."

Ali Rezaian says: “Our hope is that at the trial, they’ll realize that there’s no basis for charging him here, no basis for thinking he was involved in any kind of espionage, but if, in fact, he’s found guilty, we’ll go through the appeals process."

Ali says the sad irony is that his brother moved to Iran years ago, to give the public around the world a greater understanding of Iran’s “complex society and complex culture.”

This story is based on an interview that aired on PRI's To the Point with Warren Olney. The story was updated with interviews by Shirin Jaafari of PRI's The World. Listen to the full interview with Rezaian's friend, Zafir Janmohamed, an author and former Amnesty International official.