Three-minute read
On February 3, 2026, the Iranian regime’s judiciary convened the 53rd session of its long-running, in-absentia case against 104 members of the Iranian Resistance, while also attempting to prosecute the People’s Mojahedin Organization (PMOI) itself as a “legal entity.” The proceeding, staged in Branch 11 of Tehran’s Criminal Court One was presented as “public,” but its real audience was never the courtroom. It was the country.
What unfolded inside the session was not a conventional legal hearing. It was a political operation designed to do three things at once: appropriate the uprising’s most organized and radical edge and brand it as a criminal conspiracy, so that ordinary citizens are frightened into distancing themselves from organized resistance; intimidate a society already boiling; and reassure a shaken security base that the regime still has a narrative—and still can persecute its enemies.
#Iranian Regime’s Sham Trial Turned into a Censorship Campaignhttps://t.co/rLMySQjOFf
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 3, 2025
January Enters the Courtroom
The regime’s fear of the PMOI’s Resistance Units—and the January uprising’s organized dimension—surfaced most clearly when the complainants’ lawyer tried to drag recent events directly into the case.
According to the state report, the lawyer claimed that “images and reports from less than a month and a half ago” show media affiliated with the organization “encouraging” armed individuals described as “Resistance Units” to carry out “violent actions” and “manufacturing deaths,” presenting them “with pride.” He then called for additional security “inquiries” into the role of those units and the “continuation” of the organization’s activity.
This is not incidental courtroom rhetoric. It is a signal flare.
When a regime is confident, it dismisses opponents as irrelevant. When it is anxious, it names them—and tries to criminalize the very idea that an organized force can operate inside the country. The regime’s own insistence—inside a court session—on “continuity,” on “organization,” on “structure,” and on “recent weeks” is a tacit admission that the January uprising did not end with the crackdown. It merely changed form.
#Iran Sham Trial Censorship Campaign Targets @Mojahedineng as Uprising Fear Growshttps://t.co/7V79gBMgmk
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 17, 2025
A Courtroom Scripted for Fear
State reporting described a tightly managed setting—judge, prosecutors’ representative, selected complainants’ lawyers, and supportive attendees. But the content, delivered largely through the complainants’ counsel, read like an indictment written by security organs and performed by a robe.
The complainants’ lawyer repeated the regime’s familiar centerpiece claim: that the organization’s record includes the deaths of “more than 17,000” Iranians, and that it has “even taken pride” in such acts. Whether or not the judiciary can prove any of this in a credible forum is beside the point here. The regime is not trying to persuade independent judges. It is trying to stamp a label onto any form of organized dissent: terrorism, treason, war.
The most revealing segment came when the complainants’ lawyer argued that the case is not about a discrete historical episode, but about something “continuous” and “chain-like”—a concept meant to reach into the present and criminalize today’s networks. He explicitly claimed the PMOI’s alleged actions are “not limited to a specific decade,” and that even later members who did not take part in earlier operations are still culpable “simply by membership and activity” in what he called the continuation of that pattern.
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
Why the Regime Is Reopening This Theater Now
The question is not why the regime fears the PMOI. It always has. The question is why it is resurrecting and extending this trial in such dire circumstances.
The answer is in what the session admits. The judiciary is openly acknowledging that the most radical edge of the January uprising was organized—and that is precisely what frightens the regime. The state can brutalize dispersed crowds, even when they are large. It has decades of practice in beating, shooting, arresting, and dispersing people in the streets. But an organization with networks, discipline, and ideological backbone—one that has survived decades of massacres and extermination campaigns and still retains an international footing—cannot be eliminated the same way. It cannot be neatly separated from society, and it cannot be “finished” with a single crackdown.
That is why the session leaned so heavily on hierarchy, structure, and “continuity.” It was not simply arguing guilt; it was sending a message to the public: do not connect your anger to organized resistance. The regime’s objective is to intimidate ordinary people into isolation—so that each protest remains a scattered flash it can suppress, rather than a movement that can regenerate, coordinate, and escalate.
In the end, the show trial is less a prosecution than a confession: a confession that the regime fears not only the scale of the January uprising, but the organized force behind its sharpest blows—and that it is now using the judiciary to frighten society away from that force by criminalizing attachment to it.