A/HRC/25/61 Annex II Case summaries Interviews from a selection of the meetings held by the Special Rapporteur during his December 2013 fact-finding mission in the Netherlands, Germany and France, or otherwise conducted during the reporting period for this report. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall Mr. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall - former prisoner / brother of prisoner, who allegedly died in detention. In May 2008, Mr. Alborz Ghassemi-Shall, a retired Iranian army officer, was arrested by military police in Tehran while attempting to pick up his passport, as required by Iranian law for certain retired military officials. Twelve days later, his brother Mr. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall was also arrested at a military intelligence office while attempting to pick up his own passport, which had allegedly been seized upon his brother’s arrest. Both Alborz and Hamid were reportedly held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for 70 days at a military detention facility number 36 in downtown Tehran, at which point they were taken to an investigative judge. They were then allegedly returned to solitary confinement at the same facility, and only brought to trial at the Revolutionary Court’s Branch 29 on 30 December 2008, a date eventually postponed to 29 April 2009 due to a procedural requirement by the judge assigned to the case. The brothers were reportedly only able to access a lawyer shortly before the trial, and to meet with their counsel for 15 minutes prior to the trial, which lasted a total of two hours. They were sentenced to death for alleged connections to the Mujahidin e- Khalq (MEK) Organization, although they were apparently not officially notified of this judgment until December of that year. On 13 May 2009, both brothers were transferred to solitary confinement at Evin Prison, where they remained until 29 November 2009, when they were transferred to Ward 350 (Evin’s general population ward for political prisoners). On 19 December 2009, the brothers were reportedly transferred to the army’s Intelligence center and offered sentence-reductions in exchange for apology letters. Mr. Alborz Ghassemi-Shall apparently suffered a panic attack and was taken to a military hospital from the site where they were to write the letters. He was released on 25 December 2010, but his health continued to deteriorate to the point that he could not see or walk by the end of January 2010. By this time, Evin officials confirmed that he suffered from a tumor in his stomach, but were allegedly not permitted by intelligence officials to release him to be treated outside of the prison. Mr. Alborz Ghassemi-Shall died in Evin Prison on 19 January 2010. In November 2011, a representative of the Prosecutor’s Office contacted Mr. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall in prison to inform him that he did not believe there was sufficient state evidence to implicate anyone in his family of the activities for which he was still serving prison time. After further intercession by an Intelligence officer and continued pressure from the official in the Prosecutor’s office, Mr. Ghassemi-Shall was re-tried and given a new five-year sentence for espionage only, despite the fact that he had apparently been cleared of that particular charge already in 2008, during the investigative phase of his case. After further pressure from family members and officials, authorities agreed to count his first year in detention as prison time toward the new five-year sentence, such that he had 74