According to a verdict reviewed by Hana, a branch of Tehran Criminal Court Two, in a ruling dated June 29, 2025, acquitted an individual who had been prosecuted for advertising and selling VPN services of the charge of “providing unauthorized access.”
The case had been opened following the monitoring of an Instagram page and a report concerning the advertising and sale of VPN services. The Prosecutor’s Office had classified the sale of VPNs as an instance of providing a tool for “unauthorized access” and had prosecuted the defendant on that basis.
The court rejected this argument, holding that circumventing filtering in order to access content that its publisher has made available to the public does not amount to unauthorized access to data or to a protected computer system. On this basis, the mere sale or use of a VPN cannot, absent clear statutory language, be treated as a crime.
The significant aspect of the ruling is the court’s explicit emphasis on the principle of legality of crime and punishment and the presumption of innocence. The judge held that merely regarding conduct as prohibited or undesirable is not sufficient to classify it as criminal, and that a court may not extend the scope of a criminal charge beyond what the law itself provides.
In Hana’s view, the significance of this ruling lies less in the subject of VPNs than in the court’s sound approach in resisting an expansive interpretation of criminal law. At a time when internet restrictions and the prosecution of internet users have become one of the instruments for controlling citizens, a court’s invocation of the presumption of innocence and its refusal to criminalize conduct beyond the text of the law amounts to a rare decision.
Nevertheless, this ruling is an isolated one and remains subject to appeal, and it cannot be taken as a sign of any change in the general practice of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary. Its significance lies precisely in the exceptional nature of the ruling.