Gardaí press charges against a man for a poster on the gates of Iranian embassy

Morteza Najafi grabbed his phone and played a video.

It shows the moment on 26 April when he crossed the street and placed a poster on the gates of the Iranian embassy on Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock. 

As he strides over to the other side, he smiles and flashes a peace sign to other protesters, the video shows.

The poster featured an upside-down photo of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian regime’s former leader, who was assassinated by the US on 28 February, marked with a red X sign, and the caption: “Rest in Piss”. 

He didn’t do anything extra to affix the poster onto the gates, said Najafi, who was granted refugee status here several years ago. “Just wedged it between the bars,” he said in Persian, sitting at a city café recently.

He meant to take a few pictures of the sign up there and take it off after the protest, he said. “But we actually forgot. I didn’t want any trouble, you know how they are.”

Someone’s kid put a few “Free Iran” stickers on the gates after, Najafi said. But that has nothing to do with him, he said. 

Inside Iran, insulting the country’s supreme leader is an offence under article 514 of Iran’s “Islamic Penal Code (discretionary and preventative punishments)”, punishable by a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years imprisonment.

Here, of course, it’s not. When cops from a Dún Laoghaire garda station showed up at his home two days after the protest, Najafi said, he was thrown by it. “They said, the embassy has made a complaint.”

This is not Najafi’s first time getting in trouble over the embassy, he said. 

He had to pay a fine when, after the death of Mahsa Amini – a Kurdish woman who died in 2022 after a forceful arrest by the “morality police” –  he was so fired up that he pulled down the embassy’s sign. 

He paid a fine for that, Najafi said, and didn’t complain then. 

But this time, he wouldn’t have thought he’d done anything wrong even if he had left the poster up on purpose, he said. “I didn’t damage anything, I didn’t break anything.”

Najafi’s charge sheet says he is accused of displaying at the embassy “a poster which was threatening, abusive, insulting or obscene with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or being reckless as to whether a breach of the peace might have occasioned”. 

He’s charged under Section 7 of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act as amended, it said. He said the embassy had apparently said that they’d been “emotionally scarred” by the poster.

Najafi said he’s dismayed that the guards would press charges over a poster on behalf of the embassy and aid Iranian authorities’ efforts to silence dissent abroad.

A spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said last week that its press office was making inquiries to answer questions about the case, but has not yet addressed them. 

A spokesperson for the Iranian embassy has not yet responded to queries sent on 7 May, including one asking why it decided to make a complaint to the Gardaí. 

Uncivil disobedience 

Others agree with Najafi that prosecuting the case is overreach. 

A spokesperson for the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) said that while not absolute, the Irish Constitution largely protects freedom of expression.

“It can be limited in certain circumstances, including for the prevention of disorder or crime and the protection of the rights of others,” they said.

In reality, though, the threshold is pretty high, the spokesperson said.

And the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that protection “is applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”.

That means that any restriction or penalty imposed on speech should be “proportionate to the legitimate aim pursued”, said the spokesperson for ICCL.

Besides that, they said, ICCL has been vocal about its concerns around broadly worded offences in the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act, they said.

For someone to be found guilty under section 7 of the law, they must have done something to deliberately breach the peace. But the law doesn’t say what counts, said the ICCL spokesperson.

A 2008 case defined it as “conduct which immediately threatens a person or could cause a reasonable person to feel threatened,” they said.

Or it can be shoving, fighting, stampeding or “flying missiles”, the spokesperson said.

“The use of Section 7 in this case is concerning, given that the poster was displayed at a peaceful protest. It is crucial that people are allowed to express political opinions in a democracy,” they said.

Nothing happened during the protest, said Najafi. And they had gathered there on a Sunday when the embassy was closed to the public, he said. 

In the shadow of the war

Local Councillor Maurice Dockrell, of Fine Gael, said he’s familiar with the case. His personal view is that prosecuting it is probably an “overkill”.

He said he hasn’t looked closely at the poster, but believes the guards should have exercised their discretion not to bring a case. 

“My concern is that the embassies of totalitarian countries are not always entirely benign,” he said.

Dockrell has had his own back-and-forth with the embassy.

On 12 January, he had brought a motion to the chamber at Dún Laoghaire- Rathdown County Council to condemn the mass killing by security forces and militias of thousands of unarmed civilians in Iran at the time. 

His motion also called on the government to summon the Iranian ambassador.

On the same day, Dockrell, who’s also a barrister, sent a letter to the Iranian embassy addressed to Ambassador Kazem Sharif Kazemi. 

“There can be no moral ambiguity where unarmed civilians are beaten, imprisoned, and killed for peaceful protest. I shudder to think of the fate of the more than 11,000 protestors who have reportedly been arrested,” his letter said.

A few days later, he got a polite response that came with a “fact sheet” from ambassador-designate Eshagh Al-Habib.

Al-Habib’s letter said that the United States and Israel’s foreign intelligence agency Mossad had entered peaceful protests to foment chaos, and that’s why things took a violent turn. 

It also drew comparisons between Iran’s security forces and the Gardaí.

“The Iranian security forces and police, like those of all countries around the world, including the Irish police (Garda), who dealt forcefully with anti-immigration protests in October 2025, acted in accordance with their inherent and legal duty by firmly confronting these terrorist groups with force,” it said.

Dockrell said he didn’t accept that narrative and thought the comparison didn’t make sense. 

“I wrote back and made the point that Irish police did not use live ammunition on people, and I never got a response to that,” he said.

He agrees, Dockrell said, that the United States and Israel’s war in Iran – which he said is probably illegal and he’s against wars in principle – has overshadowed the bloodshed in January.

“But I don’t think they should be conflating the war and human rights abuses; you can still speak out against human rights abuses and how dissident opinion is treated in Iran,” Dockrell said

Ireland’s response to the mass killings in January has been broadly “muted”, he said.

Amidst the war, Iranian authorities have sped up the pace of execution for people who were arrested in January.

“Iranian authorities have carried out executions on a near-daily basis in recent weeks,” according to the Guardian. 

Let my people go 

Meanwhile, Mahya Ostovar, co-founder of the Iranian Democratic Diaspora Network in Ireland (IDDNI) – a “non-partisan” group of Iranian academics and professionals supporting a democratic Iran, according to its website – said she sees the case against Najafi as part of the regime’s transnational efforts to silence and intimidate. 

The Gardaí’s decision to bring charges against Najafi is in contrast with IDDNI’s experience of reporting incidents of harassment to the guards and struggling to get support.

On WhatsApp, she sends a video of a man launching at Iranian protestors in Galway with a closed fist. 

The man is part of what appears to be a small anti-war protest. Some of its handful of participants are carrying the flag of the Islamic Republic. 

A photo from the protest shows a man holding up his phone with an image of slain Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qasim Soleimani on its screen.

Nasim Soleimanian said it was her that the other man launched at because she was filming them. “They’re doing this to take our voices away.”

It was difficult to get the guards to take it seriously, and they only paid attention when she and her partner, Niall, kept badgering them to watch the video, Soleimanian said.

Najafi – the man who’s being charged for displaying a poster at the embassy – said he avoids protests at the city centre for the same reasons.

No one bothers them like that outside the embassy in Blackrock, he said. “Cause of the distance and all.”

Najafi – who used to be a professional judoka in Iran and joined Ireland’s national Judo team when he moved here – said he’s risking a lot in attending protests here, but he does it anyway because “that’s all I can do”.

As a refugee, he hasn’t been to Iran in almost two decades, he said.

But his wife and daughter had travelled to access healthcare, just before Israel’s 12-day war on Iran, he said. They’ve been stuck there ever since. 

“Their passports expired, and they hadn’t been able to renew them,” he said. He believes that his activism here is the reason, Najafi said. 

But he’s undaunted, he said. “I just want my Iran to be free.”