Jason Rezaian, the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, has been behind bars in Iran since July 2014. Journalists around the world have united to call for his immediate release. This timeline tracks the major developments in his case.
2014:
July 22: Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, are taken into custody in Tehran.
July 24: The Post issues a statement for the first time. Rezaian is described as “an experienced, knowledgeable reporter who deserves protection and whose work merits respect.”
August 6: CNN’s Anthony Bourdain, who interviewed Rezaian and Salehi for “Parts Unknown,” says they are “nobody’s enemy.”
October 6: Salehi is freed but Rezaian remains behind bars.
November 27: Rezaian is allowed to call his mother Mary for the first time, on Thanksgiving Day, but the conversation is brief.
December 6: Rezaian attends a court session and signs a document to acknowledge that he is being charged. But the charges remain unspecified.
December 7: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says he is “dismayed” and “deeply disappointed” by Iran’s handling of the journalist.
December 14: Rezaian’s brother Ali pleads for his release. Addressing the Iranian authorities directly, he says, “Please, just let him come home and be with us. It’s the holidays, and we all just want to be together.”
December 25: Mary Rezaian visits her son in jail on Christmas Day.
2015:
February 13: Mary Rezaian makes a personal appeal for her son’s release.
April 12: Iranian officials indicate that the charges against Rezaian include espionage. The Post says that “any charges of that sort would be absurd, the product of fertile and twisted imaginations.”
April 14: The Post’s top editor Marty Baron says Iran’s treatment of Rezaian is “simply appalling.”
April 20: Rezaian has a meeting with the lawyer assigned to defend him. The Post says “it is absurd and despicable to assert” that his work “amounted to espionage or otherwise posed any threat to Iranian national security.”
April 29: The Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says he hopes Rezaian will be cleared of the charges he faces, but “he will have to face a court.”
May 19: Iran sets a court date for Rezaian’s trial.
May 26: The trial begins. Rezaian’s family members are not allowed to observe the proceedings.
July 13: The trial resumes for a third time. According to Ali Rezaian, the defense lawyer in the case is “barred from discussing the court proceedings.”
July 15: After President Obama strikes a historic nuclear accord with Iran, a CBS News reporter suggests the president is “content” to leave Rezaian and other Americans held in Iran “unaccounted for.” Obama bristles at the question and says his administration is “working diligently to try to get them out.”
July 21: The president cites Rezaian by name in a speech and says “we are not going to relent until we bring home our Americans who are unjustly detained in Iran.”
July 22: The Post petitions the United Nations’ working group on arbitrary detention in hopes of securing Rezaian’s release.
August 10: A final hearing is held in Rezaian’s trial. “It remains unclear even to Jason’s lawyer what might happen next,” Baron said afterward.
August 18: There are reports that Rezaian will be told of the verdict by the end of the following week. (It is unknown if that actually happened.)
September 27: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani asserts that if the U.S. releases Iranians it is holding, Iran would “do everything in our power and our purview to bring about the swiftest freedom for the Americans.”
October 9: The Post highlights the fact that Razaian has been “held for the same amount of time as U.S. government employees during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, a milestone significant in its injustice.”
October 11: there is a mysterious announcement about the existence of a verdict in the trial, but the verdict is not described.