Nika Khanjani, a Concordia graduate student in Montréal, and Naeim Tavakoli, an engineer in Ottawa, will be waiting for news this weekend of the trial of seven Baha’i leaders taking place tomorrow in Tehran. Naeim is the son of Behrouz Tavakoli and Nika is the niece of Jamaloddin Khanjani, two of the leaders.
They are two Canadians, among the 30,000 Baha’is living in Canada, watching anxiously as the third session of the court proceedings against the seven imprisoned Iranian Baha’i leaders goes ahead in Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court.
It is unknown whether the hearing will be open to families of the defendants and other observers. The first two sessions were closed. The seven defendants, who have been imprisoned for two years, were responsible for tending to the spiritual needs of Iran’s 300,000 Baha’is.
In January of this year – after more than 18 months of imprisonment – they were finally presented with formal charges. These include espionage and “corruption on earth” – accusations they categorically deny.
The Canadian Government, along with the European Union, Australia, the United States, and prominent human rights organizations and experts internationally, and in countries that include Brazil and India, have denounced the Iranian regime for its ongoing persecution of the Baha’is, Iran’s largest non-Muslim religious minority.
For more information, see recent news stories at http://news.bahai.org/story/760 and http://news.bahai.org/story/759.
For further background and photographs, see http://news.bahai.org/human-rights/iran/iran-update/.