Karroubi: Iranian judiciary has no power!

Mehdi Karroubi

In a visit with families of recent political detainees, Iranian opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi noted the judiciary’s “complete loss of power” to interrogators of the intelligence ministry.

Kaleme website reports that in a meeting with families of Hassan Asadi Zeidabadi and Ali Jamali, two member of the student organization Danesh Amoukhtegan, Karroubi decried the current political atmosphere.

The charges of the said detainees range from “assembly and collusion in order to disrupt national security propaganda against the regime and insulting the leader or the president.” Karroubi asked the establishment and its supporters: “If you say that the protests have ended, then why do you keep talking about sedition everyday? Why does the tiniest movement throws you into fits of fear and anxiety? If the sedition is over, why do you not end all these arrests?”

Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic referred to the mass protests against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which protesters claim was fraudulent, as “sedition.”

Scores of government dissidents and protesters have been arrested in the past year and a half by the ministry of intelligence, the Revolutionary Guards, Police and plain clothes forces.

Karroubi stressed: “People’s rightful and legitimate protest movement persists and such arrests and attacks will not halt the reform movement of the people.”

He announced that he considers the government policies carried out against the student organizations Tahkim-e Vahadat and Danesh Amoukhtegan, who both endorsed Karroubi in the last presidential elections, as direct attacks on his person.

Mehdi Karroubi and MirHosein Mousavi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents in the 2009 presidential elections, contend that Ahmadinejad was elected through election fraud and deny the legitimacy of his government. After mass protests in Tehran and other cities were confronted with extreme state violence, in the past year and a half, the government has continued arresting and threatening their supporters and all challengers of the elections in order to silence the public outcry.