Pastor Youcef’s Attorney to be Jailed for Representing the Persecuted

Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani’s Iranian attorney has been convicted for his work defending human rights and is expected to have to begin serving his nine-year sentence in the near future.

As we have previously reported, Pastor Youcef’s attorney, Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, was sentenced to nine years in prison and banned from practicing law or teaching for ten years by the Iranian government, essentially for representing individuals like Pastor Youcef.

Dadkhah recently stated, “I was in a court in Tehran defending one of my clients, Davoud Arjangi, a jailed political activist on death row when the judge told me that my own sentence has been approved and I will be shortly summoned to jail to serve the nine-year sentence.” He continued, “I have been convicted of acting against the national security, spreading propaganda against the regime and keeping banned books at home.”

This is what happens when a government is allowed to put "public policy" and "public interest" ahead of individual rights. Check U.S. court cases, including SCOTUS, over the last fifty years. In three years of reading tons of court cases at law school, I don't think I once saw "individual rights" or "individual interests" as a reason for any decision made after, say, 1935.

The reasoning (which becomes "case law") is always "societal" or "public" interests, rights, and concerns which is a semi-veiled way of saying government interests and concerns. Government interests and concerns, outside of a narrow and limited scope as reflected in the U.S. Constitution, are almost always in opposition to individual freedoms and unalienable rights.

So what you have is a solid fifty years of U.S. case law that has replaced the value of individual liberties, interests, and rights with governmental interests. The only legal restraint to the otherwise unabated erosion of the value of individual liberties and rights in our country is the U.S. Constitution which itself is under relentless attack.

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