TEHRAN, Iran – In recent months, Iran’s powerful judiciary has found itself under pressure from an usual source — conservatives. In addition to former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his aides, who kicked off a campaign against the judicial system in August, a small but influential university student group also now has the judiciary in its crosshairs.

One member of the Justice-Seeker Student Movement told Al-Monitor, “We are revolutionaries who defend the causes of the Islamic Republic in the framework set by the former and current supreme leaders. We have always been against [and beyond] the Principlist-Reformist dichotomy.”

Despite the group's claims of not being partisan, it appears to be well anchored in the conservative camp. In December, the movement organized two meetings with judiciary chief Sadegh Larijani as well as Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, first deputy and spokesman.

On Dec. 11, Ejei’s appearance at Sharif Technical University raised eyebrows as a poet-turned-activist associated with the hard-liners stood before the powerful official and unleashed a direct attack against the conservative-dominated judicial system as a whole, that is, the courts, judges, lawyers and legal experts. Mansour Nazari, known in religious and conservative circles for his poems in praise of Iranian forces fighting in Syria, spoke of rampant, systematic corruption within the judiciary, including bribery, land grabbing and even drug-related crimes. Directly addressing Ejei, Nazari insisted that he had evidence for all of his accusations.