Family of jailed reporter Jason Rezaian still don't know what he's charged with

MARK COLVIN: By the time the Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste returned after more than 400 days in a Cairo jail, most Australians knew his name.

After 200 days in a jail in Tehran, how many have heard of the Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian?

Yet the circumstances are similar - a highly respected foreign correspondent, in Rezaian's case as I say for the Washington Post, held for the first few months without charge and still with no proper evidence produced against him.

And in Jason Rezaian's case, the jail - Tehran's Evin prison - has a particularly brutal reputation.

The 38-year-old also has chronic high blood pressure and recurring eye infections among other problems.

His brother Ali Rezaian spoke to me this afternoon.

ALI REZAIAN: He hasn't been physically mistreated in any way but the interrogations typically take the form of very long periods of time questioning over you know days or weeks or even months. They really try and do their best to kind of break you down and make you under… and then kind of build back up a narrative and try and get you to say what they want you to say. So my understanding is that it was typically seven to nine or 10 hours a day of interrogations with one or more interrogators. I know there was a team of interrogators that were… that interrogated him over time.

MARK COLVIN: When the journalist Maziar Bahari appeared on this program he told me about the range of torture that was used against him; psychological torture, he was frequently threatened with execution but also physical torture, constant hitting in the head and other things - worst things as well. Do you…. Would you think that your brother has had the same kind of thing?

ALI REZAIAN: You know I couldn't really tell you about what they said to him, my guess is that they have said things to him in terms of if you do then we'll do that and probably some things that I would consider to be threatening.

On the physical side he's made it pretty clear that you know he wasn't physically tortured, that they didn't… that they didn't… hurt him in any way that we've heard about and that's been a fairly clear message that we've heard from him since we've had contact with him, which, you know he's not direct contact. You know my mother's spoken to him three times, I've not spoken to Jason since they took him in July.

MARK COLVIN: And he has now been charged. In the middle of January they announced that they would charge him, but do you know what the charges even are?

ALI REZAIAN: We don't know what the charges are. So he was charged a few weeks ago and since then they've also assigned his case to a judge which is… was kind of the next step. So we're unsure what his charges are and we've been working to try and get him an attorney so that the attorney would be able to have access to his case file at that point we would hopefully know what the charges are but we haven't been able to do that yet.

MARK COLVIN: In the past the Iranians have charged a lot of journalists and quite often particularly if those journalists have foreign contacts they get accused of spying. Does Jason have anything to answer for in that regard?

ALI REZAIAN: You know Jason has been a journalist there in Iran for a long time, I don't know what any specific charges are but what I can tell you is you know he loves Iran, he loved his work as a journalist. He spoke with lots of different folks there in Iran as well as around the world about Iran and the folks there and the culture and what was going on there.

We have no doubt that he didn't do anything wrong with this. The charges are baseless whatever they might be and that this is really unjust what is going on.

For the first two months Jason was held he had access to nobody outside of the folks that were holding him. There was no family access or anything. After his wife was released she was able to see him typically once or twice a week for between half an hour and an hour at a time and that continued at a fairly regular pace from September early October til early December.

Starting in early December since then her access has been pretty much cut off when my mother was in Iran over the holidays between mid-December and early January, she was able to see Jason twice but my sister-in-law, his wife, has not been able to see him for several weeks now and only twice in the last two months.

MARK COLVIN: Now the Iranian foreign minister said at the weekend that he hoped that your brother Jason would be cleared in court. Do you think that means anything?

ALI REZAIAN: Well I think that, you know I know that Jason has had opportunities to meet with different folks in the government, they've seen the work that he's done and the fairness that he has. I think that their case has always been that Jason's situation needed to move through their process and now it's in the judiciary it would be seen you know by a judge, my hope is that once there's light shown on the information that's in his case file, people will realised that this is, you know, far overblown and that this is not something that should happen.

And just like with most countries their legal system has multiple steps through it so the judge won't have an opportunity to look at it and then even after there's an appeals process and other things that can go on if necessary.

MARK COLVIN: But it's been assigned to a judge who's regarded as a pretty solid hard-liner, particularly on cases of national security, particularly on journalists, does that worry you?

ALI REZAIAN: I think that that's definitely true, he - the judge - saw that he was assigned to the case was one of the judges that we knew was a possibility. I would certainly say that our hope was that you know we might have been able to get somebody else, but in this particular case, I think that by looking at what's happened, Jason's been locked up now for seven months.

They've never once brought any piece of information out that has said this is what Jason did to be detained, they've never come across with anything that even remotely resembles evidence to say this is why we're holding him. I think that that really shows you how weak their case is against him and you know I think that any fair viewing is going to show that he's innocent of these charges.

My hope is that the judge will take a look at that, that the judiciary will you know encourage him to take a fair look at what information is there and that his attorney's will have the ability to defend him.

MARK COLVIN: Ali Rezaian, brother of journalist Jason Rezaian who is jailed in Iran.

The bad news is that the judge assigned to the case is known as a hard-liner, who has been sanctioned by and barred from entering the EU due to what it calls gross human rights violations.

There’ll be a longer version of that interview on our website from this evening.

http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2015/s4176642.htm