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In a show of judicial theater aimed at countering mounting international pressure, the Iranian regime’s judiciary held the 31st session of its in absentia trial against 104 members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) on Tuesday. The hearing, conducted at Branch 11 of Tehran’s Criminal Court under the presidency of Judge Hojjatoleslam Amir Reza Dehghani, once again put on display the clerical regime’s fear of its principal opposition movement.
The IRGC-run Daneshjou News Agency (SNN) reported that the session focused not only on individual members of the PMOI but also targeted the organization’s very existence as a legal entity. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, cleric Masoud Maddah, delivered a series of incendiary remarks filled with recycled accusations, historic grievances, and ideological venom.
“Until the legal personality of this organization is dissolved,” Maddah warned, “these crimes will continue.” He demanded that the group’s legal identity be revoked, and its leadership tried and extradited — a desperate call in response to growing international recognition of the Iranian Resistance as a pro-democracy force.
Iran’s Regime Scrambles to Defend Execution of Political Prisoners Amid Global Outrage https://t.co/6fzz625OXs pic.twitter.com/U6xDhSbUDj
— M. S. Khansari (@khansari_m) April 14, 2025
Despite the circus of allegations, from long-debunked accusations about the group’s relations with foreign intelligence to crude attacks on its leadership, the regime’s underlying anxiety was clear. “How can a group responsible for 17,000 deaths now appear in international forums as a peaceful, democratic organization?” Maddah lamented — a revealing statement about the regime’s failed narrative warfare.
What truly stings Tehran is not the past, but the present: the PMOI’s success in reversing its former terror label and gaining broad support in parliaments across Europe and North America. In his speech, Maddah obsessed over why the U.S. removed the PMOI from its terror list in 2012, and why European courts rejected the label years before. He went as far as to suggest that French prosecutors should take legal action against their own officials for removing the group from terrorist designations — an extraordinary and desperate rhetorical flourish.
The court also indulged in testimonies from long-dead regime-era detainees and dubious quotes from Iraqi officials tied to post-Saddam politics, attempting to equate these with judicial evidence. Maddah cited claims that former Iraqi officials such as Ahmed Chalabi and Kadhim al-Shalaan had declared the PMOI illegal — a feeble attempt to inflate regime talking points into international consensus.
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
But the regime’s true panic lies in what it cannot control: the PMOI’s political resilience and moral capital. Once dismissed by Tehran as marginal, the organization has now become the central target of a judiciary led by executioners of the 1988 massacre — a haunting reminder of their failure to annihilate the movement.
By repeatedly referencing the organization’s revival, its support abroad, and the global campaign to proscribe the IRGC — the regime’s own terrorist backbone — the Judiciary has only reinforced the PMOI’s relevance. In a moment of dark irony, Maddah’s speech exposed not the PMOI’s guilt, but the clerical state’s desperation to resurrect the ghosts of old propaganda.
The regime’s effort to invoke “legal personality theory” to criminalize dissent highlights the surreal inversion of law under theocratic rule. In a country where even state-registered NGOs are banned, Tehran now wants international recognition to reverse-engineer criminal charges against political opposition — a contradiction lost on no one.
While the proceedings continue in Tehran, the real trial — one of legitimacy — is unfolding on the international stage. And by all signs, the clerical regime is losing.