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For fifty-six sessions, the clerical dictatorship has staged a sham trial in Tehran against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the organization itself, and more than a hundred members of the Iranian Resistance.
The regime calls it a criminal proceeding. In reality, the courtroom has become something more revealing: a public inventory of what Tehran fears—the MEK’s organization, its appeal to young Iranians, its Resistance Units, its role in protests, and its growing international recognition.
The contradiction begins with the court itself.
The co-called “Judge” Amir-Reza Dehghani opened the hearing on October 6, 2026, by proclaiming adherence to “the principles of a fair trial” and promising that the verdict would rest on evidence and law. Yet he immediately treated guilt as established, demanding that European governments arrest and extradite the accused and warning countries against providing them protection.
This is the anatomy of the sham trial: first presume guilt, then proclaim impartiality.
The regime is also playing two incompatible roles. At home, it persecutes the MEK and seeks charges such as efsad-e fel-arz, “corruption on earth,” which can carry the death penalty. Abroad, it plays the victim and demands that democratic governments surrender its opponents.
Amid War and Domestic Crises, Tehran Revives Its Trial of the Iranian Resistance #Iran #NCRIAlternative https://t.co/cq0aJrMOO3
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 24, 2026
But the most revealing contradiction concerns the regime’s claims about the MEK’s support inside Iran.
A regime media “expert” told the court that the organization “has no base or standing inside Iran” and supposedly cannot gather even eighteen people without deception. Yet the same speaker urged the judiciary, security agencies, and media apparatus to educate the population—especially young people—so they would not be drawn toward the organization.
If the MEK truly has no appeal, why must young Iranians be warned against it?
The prosecution makes the contradiction still clearer. It claims that the Resistance lacks a social base, then complains about its extensive presence on social media, its ability to address social grievances, its influence on protests, and the activity of Resistance Units inside the country.
A movement without an audience does not require this level of surveillance.
An irrelevant exile organization does not require fifty-six court sessions.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE | PMOI Resistance Unit Holds Parade in Karaj
Exclusive footage received by Simay Azadi shows a unit of the PMOI Resistance Units holding a parade in Karaj on September 3, 2026, marking the 61st anniversary of the founding of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of… pic.twitter.com/7Y4RUDIx5y— SIMAY AZADI TV (@en_simayazadi) September 4, 2026
And a political force with no connection to Iranian society does not require a nationwide campaign to prevent young people from joining it.
The regime’s clerics are even more candid.
In an October sermon in Arak, Friday prayer leader Abdollahi warned that “all the enemy’s hope is in internal unrest.” He immediately invoked the MEK and described the confrontation as something the regime has been dealing with for “47 years.” To create the impression that the regime still enjoyed public support, he praised citizens for reporting suspected MEK members to the security forces.
That is an extraordinary admission.
For decades, Tehran has insisted that the MEK is finished, hated, isolated, and irrelevant. Yet when regime officials seek to frighten their own loyal base about another uprising, they return to the same adversary—and describe the struggle as a forty-seven-year war.
The sham trial serves the same purpose. It is not merely designed to criminalize the Resistance abroad. It is meant to intimidate Iranians at home.
Young people are warned. Social-media users are warned. Resistance Units are discussed repeatedly. Security agencies are urged to intervene. Foreign governments are pressured. Even a gathering in Karaj involving eighteen people became the subject of courtroom testimony, security investigation, and state-media analysis.
A confident dictatorship would dismiss eighteen people.
#Iranian Regime’s Sham Trial Turned into a Censorship Campaignhttps://t.co/rLMySQjOFf
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 3, 2025
A frightened one holds hearings about them.
State media displays the same anxiety over the Resistance’s international standing. One Kayhan commentary published on October 4 attacks retired U.S. General Wesley Clark for praising the NCRI, the MEK, and Maryam Rajavi as an organized alternative with leadership and a program for Iran’s future. Yet Clark’s remarks explicitly state that political change must come from the Iranian people themselves. Kayhan nevertheless turns foreign political support for an Iranian opposition movement into supposed proof of foreign control.
Another propaganda device is the constantly repeated claim that the MEK killed more than 17,000 Iranians. Abdollahi repeated it as unquestionable fact.
But even the regime’s own formulations have not been consistent about that figure. The number functions less as a judicially established accounting than as a propaganda slogan—repeated until allegation becomes presumed fact.
The same method defines the entire trial. Historical allegations are stretched across decades. Present political activity is treated as proof of permanent criminality. Membership becomes guilt by association. Social-media activity becomes evidence of terrorism. International political support becomes foreign conspiracy.
The purpose is clear: to erase the distinction between opposition and crime.
Deeply troubled by the @UN Special Rapporteur's report exposing its atrocity crimes and #genocide in the 1980s, the world's leading executioner per capita is using a sham trial in #Tehran to attack the UN. pic.twitter.com/TLSxwMB8an
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 19, 2024
Yet in attempting to depict the Resistance as weak, Tehran has produced the opposite result.
If the MEK were politically irrelevant, the clerical regime would not devote judges, prosecutors, intelligence agencies, Friday prayer leaders, state television, and major state media outlets to fighting it.
The campaign’s purposes emerge from the regime’s own statements: intimidate young Iranians against joining the Resistance, mobilize loyalists against unrest, and pressure foreign governments to hand over opponents. The claims of irrelevance sit beside detailed warnings about recruitment, organization and Resistance Units. That contradiction remains unanswered.
The sham trial was designed to put the Resistance in the dock.
Instead, the clerical dictatorship has placed its own fear on display.