An Iranian judge who sentenced American graduate student Xiyue Wang to a decade in prison was hit with sanctions on Thursday in the Trump administration’s latest pressure offensive against Tehran.
Wang, a fourth-year graduate student at Princeton University, spent three years in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison after being convicted of espionage. He was freed this month in a prisoner exchange in which the Justice Department dropped charges against an Iranian scientist, Masoud Soleimani, and allowed him to leave the United States.
The judge in Wang’s case, Abolghassem Salavati, “is a tool of the regime’s repression — not an impartial friend of justice,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday.
“We’re glad we won Xiyue’s release, but he should have never been sentenced or jailed in the first place,” Pompeo said, adding that Salavati is believed to have sentenced hundreds of political prisoners. “He’s the go-to guy” in the Iranian government’s efforts to detain dissidents, Pompeo said.
It was one of several additional steps the Trump administration announced on Thursday in what officials call a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran’s clerical leaders. The effort began after the Trump administration withdrew last year from a 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Tehran.
Pompeo also announced sanctions against another judge, Mohammad Moghisseh, accusing him of handing down harsh sentences against people who have challenged the government in Tehran, including one case of a human rights lawyer who was sentenced to 33 years in prison and 148 lashes.
Visa restrictions were also threatened against Iranian officials who are found to have brutalised or persecuted peaceful protesters in demonstrations over the last month that began with anger over higher fuel prices and escalated to a call for the end of the government in Tehran.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the violent protests across Iran, including by government security forces, and thousands more have been either wounded or detained.
The visa restrictions would also apply to the family members of those former or current Iranian officials, Pompeo said. “Thugs killing people’s children will not be allowed to send their own children to study in the United States of America,” he said.
The new penalties were announced at the beginning of a 90-minute forum at the State Department on Thursday during which several senior officials and Iranian dissidents condemned Tehran’s crackdown on human rights and religious freedoms.
State Department officials clearly are hoping to capitalise on the unrest even as they insist they are not directly pushing for the government to fall. “Regime change in Iran has to come from within Iran,” said Robert A Destro, an assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights issues.
Dabrina Bet-Tamraz, who is Christian, was one of several Iranians who spoke at Thursday’s forum. She and others described systematic repression against dissidents, including loss of their jobs, religious persecution and, in some cases, torture during imprisonment.
Her father, the pastor of the Tehran Pentecostal Assyrian Church, was arrested in 2014 shortly before Christmas in what Bet-Tamraz described as an annual roundup of Iranians solely because of their religion.
“The Christmas season is a very difficult season for Christians in Iran,” Bet-Tamraz said. She cited research concluding that at least 14 Christians are being held in Iran and face prison sentences of up to 10 years on charges of threatening national security. “The reality is that they are just gathering to pray and worship,” she said.
The dissidents also urged the United States to put more pressure on Iran — and warned against good-faith diplomatic efforts with its government.
“These people do not have the minimum of morality for negotiation and they are a danger for civilisation,” said Ahmad Batebi, a journalist and activist who was imprisoned for nearly a decade after being arrested at a student protest.
Since 2017, the Trump administration has issued about 800 sanctions to punish Iran’s leaders and government-linked entities — most of which were announced this year, according to a tally compiled by Enigma, a data and technology company in New York.
