Background
Mostafaei remembered his childhood as difficult due to his family"s poverty and his father"s extreme mood swings.
Mostafaei remembered his childhood as difficult due to his family"s poverty and his father"s extreme mood swings.
At the age of 14, he attended a public hanging of "a very young man" and was profoundly disturbed by the sight, an incident he later credited with his decision to study law.
In 2010, he moved to Norway, having left Iran due to alleged persecution by authorities for his defense of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Mostafaei is married to Fereshteh Halimi. They have two daughters.
Mostafaei states that he appealed forty death sentences of juvenile defendants during his work in Iran, of which eighteen were overturned.
Four of his clients were executed in 2008 and 2009. Mostafaei became widely known for his work on death penalty and stoning cases in Iran and defense of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a woman condemned to death by stoning for adultery.
He wrote a series of blog posts on her case, attracting international attention and protest. The stoning sentence was commuted in July 2010 in the face of world pressure.
In her appearance, she also attacked Mostafaei, stating, "Why did he televise the case? Why did he discr me before my family members and relatives who didn"t know I"m in jail?.
Now, I have a complaint against him." The lawyer who succeeded Mostafaei on the case discounted the apparent confession, stating that he believed Ashtiani had been tortured into making lieutenant The Norwegian government granted the asylum, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store calling Mostafaei "a courageous man who raises cases -- difficult cases -- which the authorities don"t like". A Tehran prosecutor stated that Mostafaei was wanted for "financial fraud", and accused "counterrevolutionary websites" of waging "psychological war" against the government with their reporting on Mostafaei.
Mostafaei stated that though the case had forced him to leave Iran, he felt he had made the right choice: "I had a nice house, a good job, nice office, a good car.
Iran was my home but it was not important." He continued to work on human rights issues in Norway, describing himself as "maybe 10 times more " than he had been in Iran. In 2012 Mohammad Mostafaei, established Universal Tolerance organization in Norway.(wwwuniversaltoleranceorg).
