Four-minute read
By its own official account, the clerical regime in Tehran has now held the 46th hearing of a mass trial in absentia against 104 members of the Iranian Resistance.
On paper, the case is about “terrorism.” In reality, the latest session laid bare something very different: a frightened regime using its judiciary to attack an opposition satellite channel in Europe, to threaten France with legal consequences, and to rewrite the history of its own crimes.
If this is “strength,” it is a very peculiar kind of strength.
When a judge sounds like a satellite lobbyist
The most striking feature of this hearing was not the routine repetition of decades-old accusations. It was the judge’s obsession with Simaye Azadi, a satellite television channel which is affiliated with the Iranian resistance.
Instead of confining himself to the charges, he launched into a long speech about:
- European and French laws on communications,
- the French operator Eutelsat and its Hotbird satellites,
- the French media regulator ARCOM, and
- why France, in his view, must stop allowing Simaye Azadi to broadcast.
Sham Trial in #Iran Highlights Clerical Dictatorship’s Desperationhttps://t.co/6Hi31hfMQK
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 11, 2024
He even cited the case of al-Manar, previously taken off French-controlled satellites, and argued that France must treat Simaye Azadi in the same way—because it belongs, as he put it, to the “first defendant” in this trial.
Think about that for a moment: a Tehran criminal court is using a so-called terrorism trial primarily to deliver a political message to a foreign democracy and to demand the censorship of an opposition TV channel outside Iran’s borders.
If the Resistance were marginal and irrelevant, would the regime’s judiciary devote its time to lecturing Paris about satellite uplinks and the legal duties of ARCOM? Would it transform a domestic trial into an open pressure campaign on France to silence one station?
This is the behavior of a state that knows it is losing the information battle at home and fears the organizational power that comes from an independent, nationwide voice beamed into Iranian living rooms.
Exporting censorship under the banner of “counterterrorism”
The judge’s argument was simple and dangerous: because the clerical regime calls the Resistance “terrorists,” European governments must treat any platform they use as a violation of counter-terrorism conventions.
There is no mention, of course, of the fact that European and other Western courts and governments have already examined these allegations and removed the Resistance from their terrorist lists. Those legal battles are simply erased. The regime’s designation is presented as the only reality that matters, and Europe is warned to fall in line.
In other words, Tehran is trying to export its blacklist into European law, not through diplomacy but through the mouth of a judge in a show trial.
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
Rewriting the 1988 massacre out of fear of justice
The trial also wandered into another revealing territory: the 1988 prison massacre, when thousands of political prisoners – the vast majority from the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)– were executed following a secret fatwa.
The regime’s representatives now attempt to rebrand the infamous “death commissions” as “amnesty committees.” They claim that prisoners were generously pardoned without even needing to repent, that they simply had to “announce they were no longer with the organization.” They even set this fabricated “mercy” against episodes of mass killing in European history, as if the clerical dictatorship could present itself as a benchmark of humanitarian justice.
This narrative is not aimed at the Iranian people. They know too many victims, too many families who never saw the bodies of their loved ones, too many unmarked graves.
It is aimed at the international community.
Why? Because survivors and the Resistance have kept the memory of 1988 alive. Names have been recorded. Locations of mass graves have been exposed. Former officials have been identified. Cases have already reached European courts. UN experts now speak openly about the 1988 killings as possible crimes against humanity.
In that context, the regime’s need to transform executioners into “members of an amnesty committee” is not historical curiosity. It is legal panic.
The Resistance’s crime, in the eyes of the regime, is not only that it continues to organize. It is that it insists on naming the crimes of the past and calling for justice under international law. The sham trial, with its grotesque revisionism, is part of a defensive wall against that justice.
Clerical Regime’s Court Theater Against @Mojahedineng Reveals Fear of #Iran’s Rising Resistance Generationhttps://t.co/rLXARmKOKM
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) April 30, 2025
What the regime is really indicting
Strip away the propaganda and the slogans, and the picture is clear.
In this so-called courtroom, the clerical regime is not really putting 104 absent individuals on trial. It is putting on trial:
- A television channel that breaks the state’s monopoly on information and broadcasts images of protests, Resistance Units and uprisings.
- A political alternative that challenges the regime’s favorite argument to foreign governments: “It’s us or chaos.”
- A memory of massacre that refuses to die, and that increasingly speaks in the language of international criminal law.
That is what this 46th hearing is about. Not justice. Not security. Fear.
Desperately attempting to spin new narratives about the @Mojahedineng during its staged trial, the clerical regime is essentially undermining its own decades-long #propaganda against the movement. This not only weakens Khomeini's defamation tactics but also inadvertently… pic.twitter.com/WkAzHs3ZGC
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) May 12, 2024
A message to Western democracies
The clerical regime cannot defeat the organized Resistance in open political competition. It cannot answer the demands of the Iranian people for freedom, equality and an end to clerical rule. So, it turns, once again, to propaganda, fake news, prisons, and satellite jamming – and now to public “warnings” aimed at Western capitals.
A regime that needs 46 hearings, a mass trial in absentia and a campaign against one satellite channel is telling the world something important about itself.
It is not confident. It is not secure.
It is afraid of its organized Resistance – and of the day it will be held to account.