After several postponements, the trial finally took place in January 2012 in a courtroom at Evin prison after more than a year of uncertainty.
Although the details of the trial have not been made public, a source tells us that the charges against Fathi were "acts against regime security, contact with foreign organizations and religious propaganda".
The source told Mohabat News that Fathi's case will go to an appeals court after his lawyer appealed the six-year prison sentence. The source believes that it is not unlikely that the sentence could be overturned on appeal.
This verdict comes after Fathi has been illegally detained in total uncertainty for the past 15 months.
Such a wrongful sentence handed down by the Islamic Republic's judicial system to a Christian convert whose only crime is practicing his Christian faith is against international rules and the Human Rights Convention that the Islamic Republic has signed and is committed to following.
Farshid Fathi is currently being held in Ward 350 of Evin Prison.
Hard targeting converts to Christianity
Farshid Fathi has spent several months in solitary confinement and has never been allowed out. To increase the mental pressure on him ahead of the Norouz celebrations, prison guards and interrogators informed him that he would be temporarily released, but as he was leaving the ward he was stopped and taken back to solitary confinement.
Farshid Fathi was born in 1979. He is married and has two children. He was arrested by security authorities in Tehran on December 26, 2010 as part of a crackdown on Christians ahead of the New Year celebrations. Around 60 Christian citizens and members of house churches in Tehran and other cities were arrested in this carefully coordinated and well-organized attack by security authorities. The families of the Christian prisoners were informed that the charges against those arrested included conversion (apostasy from Islam), evangelization and contact with Christian organizations.
The day after this incident, the regime's news channels began publishing the news, declaring that the leaders of evangelical Christianity in Iran had been arrested. Tehran's governor, Morteza Tamadon, described the captured Christians as "extremists" who "penetrate Islam as corrupt and deviant people". According to Iran's official news agency, he said the Christians have links to England. It is very common for Iran's regime to accuse its enemies of being supported by the West in this way. Tamadon added that "this group tried to establish an extreme form of Christianity similar to the Taliban and Wahhabi in Islam. They were tracked and some of their leaders fell into our trap and triggered the initial attack against them!" He also added that he will increase the pressure against evangelical Christians with more arrests.
Shortly after Morteza Tamadon gave his speech, and Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini gave another speech stating that house churches should be on the agenda, a new wave of surveillance and arrests of Christian converts broke out in Iran.
This new pressure intensified after the 2011 New Year and has continued ever since. According to the annual report on arrests of Christian converts in Iran in 2011-2012, published by Mohabat News, a large number of Iranian Christians have been summoned and some have been arrested. These Christians, most of whom have converted from Islam, are being prosecuted for their active involvement in evangelical work, according to the authorities.
Read more about the work for persecuted Christians in Iran here...
Source: Mohabat News
