Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has ignored a request to grant a trial to an Iranian opposition leader and reformer who has been held under house arrest since the contested 2009 presidential elections, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

Rouhani, who assumed office in 2013, has been called a reformer and previously promised a greater degree of openness in Iran, including by ending the house arrests of Mehdi Karroubi and other leaders of the Green Movement who challenged the governing hierarchy — Mir Hussein Moussavi and his wife, Zahra Raghnavard.

Rouhani is now faced with the choice of either granting the request, which was published as a letter on a foreign Persian-language website, and challenging Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or ignoring it and appearing ineffectual to supporters who view him as a reformer.

Karroubi did not ask for a pardon from Rouhani in the letter, acknowledging that this “is not in your power,” but demanded a public trial.

Although Rouhani had promised greater openness during his campaign, the latest United Nations report on human rights in Iran found that freedoms were severely curtailed during the first two years of his rule while executions reached a ten-year high. Reports over the past two and a half years have consistently shown a deterioration in the human rights situation in Iran.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal last month observed that when it comes to Iran’s ballistic missile program, which continues in defiance of UN Security Council resolution 2231, so-called reformers like Rouhani work in close cooperation with hardliners.

[Photo: BBC World Service / Flickr ]