Activists

Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee or Golrokh Iraee, 43, is an Iranian writer, accountant, political prisoner and a human rights defender who advocates against the practice of stoning in Iran. As a religious prisoner of conscience she was represented by Vice Chair of the USCIRF Gayle Manchin.

In September 2014, the Iranian government searched the home of Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee and her husband Arash Sadeghi in Tehran. The guards took laptops, notebooks and CDs. They found an unpublished story Iraee wrote about stoning a woman. In the story, a young woman watches the movie, “The Stoning of Soraya M”, becomes angry, and burns a copy of the Koran.

After the story was found, Iraee and her husband Sadeghi were arrested by four men believed to be from the Revolutionary Guards. They took Sadeghi to Evin Prison, but they took Iraee to a secret place for three days. They did not allow her to see a lawyer or to talk to her family. Then they took her to Evin Prison. For 17 days, they questioned her for hours, blindfolded her, and threatened to kill her. While they interrogated Iraee, she had to listen to the guards kick and choke her husband in the next cell.

Iraee had two short hearings. Her first hearing was about her husband’s political activity. She was not permitted to speak. During the second hearing she was in the hospital after surgery, but the court would not look at her medical records. Her first lawyer was pressured to drop her case, and her second lawyer was prohibited from representing her.

In October 2016, Iranian officials called Ebrahimi Iraee on a friend’s telephone and told her to go to Evin Prison to start serving a six-year prison sentence. They did not have an arrest warrant, as the law requires. Iraee was convicted of “insulting Islamic sanctities” and “spreading propaganda against the system.”

She began serving her six-year sentence that month for “insulting the sacred” and “propaganda against the state,” after she wrote a story about stoning. Iraee was released from prison on January 3, 2017 after a 71-day hunger strike by her husband and a protest on Twitter that got international attention, but she was returned to prison January 22, after her husband stopped his hunger strike.

During the Mahsa Amini protests the Iranian government began the mass arrest of dissidents, including human rights defenders, students, lawyers, journalists and civil society activists. Iraee was also arrested by security forces in her house on September 26, 2022 and taken to an undisclosed location. During the arrest, security forces searched her house and confiscated some of her personal belongings. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), security officers broke the door to Iraei’s house and entered her room during the arrest. The officers also kicked her in the stomach, which caused her to hit the cabinet in the room, and this caused severe damage to her back and stomach.