The defense attorneys of the incarcerated environmental activists are denied communication with their clients.

The news was announced by Kazem Hosseini, one of the five attorneys who has attended four sessions of the trial.

He said: “We have not been allowed to talk to our clients yet and the longest conversations we have had were greetings.”

Hosseini said what the law enforcement is doing is illegal because the case investigations are over.

This is on top of the fact that the incarcerated environmental activists were not allowed to choose their own defense attorneys and their current five attorneys, including Hosseini, were approved and appointed by the judiciary.

During the procedures, Mohammad Hossein Aqasi, the attorney appointed to Sam Rajabi, was fired by him. Rajabi’s family believe that the judiciary pressured Sam to fire his attorney.

Sam Rajabi, Amir Hossein Khaleghi, Houman Jokar, Sepideh Kashani, Niloufar Bayani, Taher Ghadirian, Abdolreza Kouhpayeh, and Morad tahbaz are the environmental activists who have been incarcerated for over a year by the IRGC intelligence. They have been charged with espionage, spreading corruption on earth, and connection to enemy states.

However, the ministry of intelligence announced last year that the activists are not spies, but that does not seem to have affected their case. Niloufar Bayani, who was present for the first two sessions of the court, was absent from the last two. It might be because she told judge Salavati that her confessions were taken under physical abuse and threats by the interrogators.

According to the Human Rights Campaign in Iran, the security forces took Niloufar Bayani to several locations in Tehran in order to present a scenario that showed her being free and having a good time, but she refused to get out of the car.

The families of the activists have written two letters to Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, asking him to intervene in their case. So far they have not received any responses.