The Dec. 31 trial of doctors Kamiar and Arash Alaei was shrouded in secrecy, denying the two HIV/AIDS doctors of even the most basic human rights. Nature’s Declan Butler writes:

The Alaeis were arrested last June, and their detention and trial were “unfair even by the draconian standards of Iran’s penal code”, says Jonathan Hutson, a spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hutson points out that the six-month detention itself breached human rights, as Iran failed to meet its international legal obligations to explain the arrests, or to allow the men access to lawyers or the right to contest their detention before a judge.

And although Iranian law prohibits anyone from being detained for more than four months without charge, the state filed the charge of communicating with an “enemy government” only in December. Moreover, at the trial the prosecution indicted the men on new secret charges, now known to be the plot charges, denying them the right to defend themselves against these accusations and their right to due process.

Furthermore, the purported confessions used by Iranian prosecutors were likely extorted, according to sources close to PHR.

Last week, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency cited an Iranian counter-intelligence official as saying that the brothers and two other unnamed individuals had confessed to working on behalf of the United States to overthrow the state, and that these statements would be televised. “Given interrogation techniques and duress known to exist in other cases like this one in Iran, any purported confession must be viewed as tainted and unreliable,” says Hutson.

In light of these gross violations of due process and the utter lack of evidence against the Alaeis, we urge the government of Iran to release the doctors immediately.