UPDATE: Jailed in Iran for defending trade unions

UPDATE on the blog below. Sometimes good things happen. Just a day after he was sentenced, Mr Olyaiefard has been released. The revolutionary court has accepted that Olyaiefard had not been given a chance to appeal his original conviction. Good news for once!ORIGINAL blog:On 08 March 2010 Dr. Mohammad Oliyaeifard, a member of the International Bar Association and one of the lawyers defending the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed) and the Syndicate of Workers of the Haft Tapeh Sugar Plantation was sentenced to 1 year in jail.He had already been found guilty of 'endangering national security' on 10 February 2010. Such nebulous charges allow the Iranian regime to abandon normal legal processes and consign critics of injustice to the Revolutionary Courts. One of the unions he has represented - the bus workers' of Tehran, who have two leaders in jail - said yesterday that "in the past few years, Mr. Oliyaeifard demonstrated unprecedented efforts in defending his clients and to have fair trails and truth finding commissions. He defended his clients without any expectations to a point where he himself became a victim of the seeking the truth."Owen Tudor