11/12/2025
Verisheh Moradi, Kurdish activist was arrested in August 2023, held for months in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison, and eventually tried by Branch 15 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court. In November 2024, that court sentenced her to death on the charge of baghi, “armed rebellion against the state”, based largely on her alleged links to Kurdish opposition groups, after a trial marred by torture and denial of defence rights.
On 10 December 2025, Iran’s Supreme Court overturned that death sentence. According to her lawyer, the court accepted her appeal because the case file was riddled with “investigative flaws” and basic legal procedures had not been respected, including the failure to clearly inform her of the exact charge that became the basis of the death penalty. The Supreme Court did not acquit her; it quashed the verdict and sent the case back to the same Revolutionary Court branch for a new review and retrial.
It is important to understand what this “overturning” actually means in Iran’s legal system. The Supreme Court in Tehran does have the power to review capital cases and annul verdicts when there are procedural or legal errors. But in political cases, it almost never questions the underlying laws themselves, only whether they were applied “properly.” When it quashes a judgment, the file usually goes back to the same lower court, often even to the same judge, who can in theory issue a lighter sentence, repeat the death sentence with better paperwork, or, more rarely, acquit. So Verisheh Moradi is no longer under an active death sentence, but she is still a political prisoner, still on trial, and still at risk.
All of this sits inside a judiciary that is explicitly built on Islamic law. Iran’s constitution defines the state as an Islamic Republic, declares Twelver Shia Islam the official religion, and requires that all laws be based on “Islamic criteria” and the official interpretation of sharia.
The Islamic Penal Code incorporates classical categories of Islamic criminal law, hudud (fixed religious punishments), qisas (retribution in kind), and ta’zir (discretionary punishments). A long list of offences can carry the death penalty, including not only murder but also certain drug crimes and several political-religious charges such as moharebeh (“enmity against God”) and baghi.
Baghi in Shia jurisprudence historically meant armed rebellion against a “just Islamic ruler.” In the Islamic Republic’s Penal Code it has been codified as article 287, a vague, elastic offence that allows Revolutionary Courts to treat dissidents, activists and members of opposition groups as rebels against God’s order and punish them with death.
Islamic Revolutionary Courts, operate with minimal transparency, rely heavily on intelligence-agency files and forced confessions, and are at the core of Iran’s machinery of political executions.
So the story of Verisheh Moradi’s case is not simply about one sentence being overturned; it shows how a theocratic legal system uses religiously framed categories to criminalize political opposition, and how even “good news” comes in the form of a technical correction inside a structure that still claims the right to kill her. The Supreme Court’s decision has bought her time and opened a crack for renewed legal and public pressure, but the law that allowed a women’s rights activist to be condemned as a “rebel against God” remains firmly in place.
