Tehran’s in-absentia proceedings against 104 dissidents linked to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) entered their forty-second session this week at Branch 11 of the Tehran Criminal Court. The hearings, which began in late 2023 and have continued into 2024 and 2025, have been presented by state media as major criminal adjudication. In reality, they function as political theater, designed to criminalize the principal organized alternative to clerical rule and to project an image of control at a moment when the regime’s internal stability is visibly eroding.
None of the named defendants are in Iran. Some have passed away, most have lived abroad for decades, many in Europe. The ideological charges—moharebeh (enmity against God), baghy (rebellion), and “corruption on earth”—are not used to adjudicate specific acts, but to suppress political identity. The very first “defendant” listed is not a person at all, but the PMOI as an organization. The state is attempting not to establish guilt, but to erase legitimacy.
This week’s session made that purpose particularly explicit. Presiding cleric-judge Amir-Reza Dehghani opened the session with a political address marking 13 Aban, which the regime commemorates as the “National Day of Struggle Against Global Arrogance.” From the bench, he repeated familiar extremist rhetoric, referring to the United States as “the Great Satan and axis of evil” and framing the proceedings within the regime’s founding narrative of permanent confrontation with the West. Only after that framing did the session move to its performative witness testimony.
Justice in Absurdity: #Iran’s Lawless Dictator Holds Trial of Sworn Enemieshttps://t.co/gMVIRpmuT0
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 25, 2023
The most significant statement came when the judge declared that “the defendants are obliged to appear in court, and the governments hosting them are obliged to extradite them.” The regime knows that European governments will not extradite political dissidents to Iran—particularly not into a system where due process does not exist and where many of those named have already been condemned to death. The point was not legal instruction but messaging: a threat to the Iranian diaspora and an attempt to signal that exile does not guarantee safety.
The performance was also directed inward. Since the nationwide uprisings beginning in late 2017, the regime has faced a population that no longer accepts its political categories. Protest slogans explicitly rejected both the monarchy of the past and the clerical establishment of the present. In this context, the PMOI/NCRI’s platform—secular governance, gender equality, political pluralism, decentralization, and a non-nuclear foreign policy—has found renewed traction, especially among younger Iranians who have no memory of the 1980s and no investment in the regime’s founding mythologies.
It is precisely this generational discontinuity that the show trial attempts to interrupt. For youth born in the 2000s, terms like “Monafeqin,” “Mersad,” and “Forough-e Javidan” do not carry intrinsic emotional meaning. The regime must narrate them into meaning. The repeated re-enactment of 1980s battles through choreographed testimony is a way of spinning the desired narrative—teaching that organized political dissent is not disagreement, but treason; not opposition, but existential threat to the nation.
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
At the same time, the proceedings attempt to re-stiffen a demoralized loyalist base. The clerical dictatorship has lost its ability to reproduce ideological conviction. The last decade of economic collapse, corruption scandals, internal power feuds, and leadership succession uncertainty has eroded the regime’s traditional social anchors. Fear is the remaining instrument. The message embedded in the courtroom spectacle is clear: however frustrating internal governance may be, the alternative is “chaos,” “foreign penetration,” and national dissolution.
The trial also echoes a well-documented historical continuity. The same charges used here were deployed in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners, when over 30,000 detainees—primarily PMOI supporters—were executed after summary proceedings lasting minutes. Many of the officials involved in that purge now hold senior judicial and security positions. What we are watching today is not a break with the past. It is the past being repeated because the system lacks any new means of sustaining itself.
Yet the sheer duration of the spectacle betrays its fragility. A confident state does not stage forty-two sessions against opponents who are not present. It would not need to. It would simply ignore them.
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
The proceedings also reveal something else: the regime’s fear is no longer abstract. The PMOI and NCRI are not simply exiles maintaining a symbolic opposition. Their organizational infrastructure is intact, their political program is coherent, and their network of Resistance Units inside Iran has expanded in both visibility and tactical maturity. International demonstrations in 2025 marking the PMOI’s 60th anniversary were notably younger, more diverse, and more globally integrated than in previous decades. This is not nostalgia. It is political succession work.
Seen clearly, the in-absentia show trial is not about the past at all. It is about the future.
The regime is signaling that it considers the organized democratic alternative real, internal, and dangerous to its survival.
If it were not, there would be no spectacle to stage.
The regime is telling us what it fears.
The world—and the Iranian people—are taking note.