Former political prisoner Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee is rearrested

Iranian human rights activist Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee was arrested on Saturday at her home in Tehran, with at least ten security agents raiding her home before taking her into custody.

Iraee, a former political prisoner, must now serve a sentence handed down in July and upheld on appeal without further examination, according to her lawyer Amir Raissian, which relates to a protest that she took part in during her last detention where she criticized the Iranian regime for the execution of three Kurdish dissidents.

Iraee and fellow political prisoner Atena Daemi were found guilty on vague national security charges, the kind often levied against political prisoners. They were sentenced to three years and seven months in prison for “insulting the supreme leader” (two years and one month) and “propaganda against the state” (one year and six months) each by Judge Iman Afshari of Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran.

They will each have to serve at least two years and one month of that sentence.

Iraee was first arrested, alongside her husband and two other activists, by the intelligence division of the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) on September 6, 2014. She was held for three weeks on Ward 2A in Evin Prison, which is known to be the IRGC Intelligence ward, before being released on September 27 on an 800 million rial bail for her activities on Facebook.

Iraee was later sentenced to six years in prison for “insulting sanctities” and “propaganda against the state”, which are again vague charges levied against political activists. Her crime? Writing an unpublished story about the barbaric punishment of stoning in Iran, which the regime would never have known about had they not stormed her house and seized her computer.

In October 2016, her house was stormed by security forces and she was taken to Evin Prison to serve her sentence. Her husband Arash Sadeghi, who began serving a 15-year prison sentence earlier that year for his peaceful political activities, went on a hunger strike in protest to her arrest and after 72 days she was released on January 3, 2017.

However, she was re-arrested on January 22 of that year when she went to the hospital where Sadeghi was supposed to be examined.

Iraee was released on bail in April 2019 after serving 3.5 years of her six-year prison sentence.

Since then, she has been campaigning on Twitter for the release of cancer-stricken Sadeghi and calling for him to be allowed access to medical treatment because he is in poor health following a cancer operation last year.