Vida Mehrannia, left, wife of Ahmadreza Djalali, attends a session of the chamber commission for external relations at the federal parliament in Brussels on April 24. Dr. Djalali has been imprisoned in Iran for nine years.HATIM KAGHAT/AFP/Getty Images

Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Canadian former minister of justice and attorney-general, and international legal counsel to Ahmadreza Djalali. Judith Abitan is the executive director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a fellow of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Scholars program.

On April 25, 2016, Ahmadreza Djalali, a Swedish-Iranian disaster-medicine expert, was arrested by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Despite being invited by the University of Tehran, he was arbitrarily detained and subjected to months of interrogation in solitary confinement at Evin Prison’s Ward 209, and then sentenced to death for “corruption on earth” following a sham trial based on coerced confessions of espionage extracted under torture.

Iranian state media has relentlessly spread falsehoods, portraying Dr. Djalali as a threat to the state and enemy of the people. These slanders have been exploited against him while traumatizing his family in Sweden, exemplifying the intersection of domestic oppression and transnational repression.

Dr. Djalali’s wife and children – 13 and........

© The Globe and Mail