Kar / Pourzand

Case story · Updated November 2026

An old man held hostage to silence his wife

Siamak Pourzand was 70 years old when men forced him into a car on a Tehran street on the night of November 24, 2001. For months his family did not know where he was or whether he was alive. His captors were not interested in him for anything he had done. They wanted to reach his wife, Mehrangiz Kar, one of Iran's best-known human rights lawyers, who was then in the United States.

The lawyer

Mehrangiz Kar spent decades in Tehran's courtrooms defending women, children and political prisoners, and wrote widely on women's rights and legal reform. She edited the women's journal Zan until the authorities banned it.

In April 2000, after reformists won Iran's parliamentary elections, she was among a group of Iranian writers and activists who spoke at a conference in Berlin titled "Iran after the Elections," hosted by Germany's Heinrich Böll Foundation. When she came home she was arrested, held for nearly two months in Evin Prison, and later sentenced to four years for "acting against national security." She was then diagnosed with breast cancer. Under international pressure, Iran let her travel to the United States for treatment. She has not been able to go back.

The journalist

Siamak Pourzand, born in 1931, belonged to an older generation of Iranian journalists. Decades earlier he had worked as a foreign correspondent for the Tehran daily Kayhan. Later he wrote film criticism and cultural commentary, and ran the Tehran Cultural Center, a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals. He was a cousin of the poet Ahmad Shamlou. When his wife left for treatment, he stayed in Tehran.

A decade of captivity

After his abduction, Pourzand was held in secret by Iran's intelligence services. Months later he appeared on state television to "confess." In 2002 he was sentenced to 11 years in prison after a trial that Human Rights Watch called a mockery of the law. In phone calls his jailers allowed, he sounded broken. His health collapsed in custody, and at one point he lay in a coma in a Tehran hospital.

He was released for a time, rearrested in 2003, and later moved to house arrest, where he remained, ill and isolated, for years. On April 29, 2011, at 79, he died after falling from the balcony of his Tehran apartment. Human rights groups said years of persecution had driven him to it.

The family's case

Mehrangiz Kar and their daughters, Azadeh Pourzand and the journalist Banafsheh Zand, sued Iran in federal court in Washington. Iran did not appear. In September 2022, Judge John D. Bates ruled that Iran had taken Siamak Pourzand hostage, from 2001 to 2002 and again from 2003 until his death, to pressure his wife to give up her human rights work, and that he was tortured throughout his detention. The court entered judgment for the family.

Why this case matters

Torturing the old to silence the outspoken. Pourzand was a man in his seventies, punished not for his own work but for his wife's. A U.S. court recognized that holding and abusing a family member to coerce someone else is hostage-taking.

Repression that crosses borders. Kar was safe in the United States; Iran reached her through her husband. The same tactic has since been used against the families of other critics abroad, including the brother of journalist Masih Alinejad.

A record of what was done. Iran never acknowledged what it did to Siamak Pourzand. The judgment stands as an American court's finding of what happened to him.

Disclosure: Herischi Law represents the family in Kar et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran and Zand v. Islamic Republic of Iran (D.D.C.). Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.