rom Article 48 to the Engineering of the Right to Defense
In the first part of this report, the cases of dozens of lawyers who were arrested, summoned, prosecuted, or deprived of their professional rights were examined. These cases demonstrated that pressure on Iran’s legal community has evolved beyond isolated incidents and has become a nationwide pattern.
Yet a fundamental question remains: What connects these seemingly disparate cases? Are they merely a collection of separate security-related actions, or do they form part of a broader mechanism designed to control the right to defense in political and security-related cases?
This second part examines the role of Article 48 of Iran’s Code of Criminal Procedure, restrictions on the right to choose legal counsel, and what many legal experts have described as the “engineering of the right to defense.”
Chapter Three: Engineering the Right to Defense in Iran
A review of cases involving Iranian lawyers in recent years demonstrates that their arrests, summonses, and professional sanctions cannot be understood simply as a series of unrelated incidents. What has emerged across cities including Mashhad, Rasht, Shiraz, Tehran, Tabriz, and Ahvaz points to the development of a broader mechanism aimed at controlling legal defense in political and security-related cases.
Mai Sato, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, has repeatedly warned in her reports and communications about increasing pressure on independent lawyers and the denial of detainees’ access to counsel of their own choosing. She has emphasized that lawyers who sought to defend protesters or document violations of their rights have faced summonses, arrests, threats, and judicial prosecution.
These concerns extend beyond the situation of a handful of lawyers. What has taken shape in Iran is a multi-layered mechanism for controlling the right to defense; one in which the arrest of lawyers, professional restrictions, Article 48, interference in the independence of the Bar Association, and limitations on access to case files all function as components of a single policy.
In an independent judicial system, lawyers play a vital role in maintaining a balance between state power and the rights of the accused. In many political and security-related cases in Iran, however, independent lawyers are viewed as obstacles to the security apparatus because they can document allegations of torture, challenge coerced confessions, record procedural violations during interrogations, and subject judicial proceedings to public scrutiny.
For this reason, pressure on lawyers cannot be analyzed separately from pressure on defendants. As the political climate becomes increasingly securitized and the number of detainees grows, efforts to control the defense process intensify as well. The objective is not merely to punish a number of lawyers; it is to limit society’s capacity to access independent legal representation.
This trend is reflected most clearly in Article 48 of Iran’s Code of Criminal Procedure; a provision that has become one of the principal tools for restricting political and security-related defendants’ access to independent lawyers in recent years.
