Peaceful expression, membership in the banned Iranian Writers Association.

Yasaman Aryani, 24 years old, and her mother Monireh Arabshahi appeared in a video celebrating International Women's Day by passing out flowers to women in a Tehran subway.

Arrested in April 2019 (one day before her mother's arrest), Aryani was held in solitary confinement for nine days, during which security forces threatened to arrest her younger sibling and father unless she appeared on camera expressing “repentance” for sending videos of themselves without head coverings to the White Wednesdays social media campaign. They taunted her that her case had been forgotten by the outside world.

Yasaman and Monireh were each sentenced to 16 years in prison, later reduced to 9.5 years.

At time of publication, Yasaman has been temporarily furloughed.

Released, returned to UK as part of negotiations with UK government March 2022.

A 67-year-old retired engineer and father of two, Ashoori was arrested by Iranian Military Intelligence officials in August 2017 when he traveled to Iran to visit his elderly mother. His grossly unfair trial was based solely on torture-tainted “confessions”.

Born in Iran, Niloufar Bayani holds an MA in Conservation Biology from Columbia University and worked for the UN Environmental Programme. In 2017 she joined other wildlife conservationists in the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation to monitor the endangered Asian Cheetah. In 2018 she and 7 others in the group were arrested and charged with espionage.

Bayani was held incomunicado in solitary for 8 months in Evin Prison and interrogated for 1,200 hours. In an open letter to Supreme Leader Khameini, she details how interrogators threatened her with rape and death, threatened to torture and kill her parents, made her imitate the sounds of wild animals, stripped her and forced her to take part in their sexual games.

She was sentenced for "collaborating with the US enemy state" in a trial without proof or legal representation.

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First arrested in 2014 and again in 2016, Atena Daemi was incarcerated in solitary confinements for long periods of time for passing out leaflets opposing the death penalty and criticizing Iran's execution record on social media. She has repeatedly gone on hunger strikes to protest prison conditions and the death penalty while behind bars at Evin prison. In 2018 and again in 2020 she was tried for new charges of insulting the "Supreme Leader" and disrupting the public order for peaceful protests such as filing a complaint, sitting in, and chanting anti-government slogans inside Evin prison; her sentence was prolonged 2 more years, and she was exiled to distant Lakan prison.

She was released 7 months early in January 2022 after years-long international campaigns.

Ganji's crime was translating a book about a Kurdish-led uprising in Syria.

Re-arrested in 2019 for denouncing torture and sexual abuse while in prison for participation in earlier public protests. In 2018, she was arrested for solidarity with Haft-Tapeh workers' protests, and in 2016 for activism about the situation of unknown prisoners and environmental conditions in the city of Ahvaz.

On Dec 19, 2021, Ghorbani was secretly hanged despite international outcry denouncing his sham trial and torture. Ghorbani was member of Independent Trade Union of Iran and an ethnic Kurd. Crowds gathered outside his home in Kurdistan to protest his execution.

Arrested in 2016; tried in several cases for alleged membership in Kurdish Democratic Party and "armed rebellion", for which he was sentenced to death in 2019. The only "evidence" presented, according to Amnesty International, was a forced "confession" obtained through torture and videotaped to be shown on TV. In mid August 2021, the regime refused to grant his lawyer's request for a retrial, and upheld the death sentence.

She wrote an unpublished story about stoning that was confiscated during a raid of her home by the Revolutionary Guards, aimed at her husband, human rights defender and former student activist Arash Sadeghi.

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According to Amnesty International, Jalalian participated in social and political activities aimed at empowerment of women of the Kurdish minority and at Kurdish self-determination. She denies membership in the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, and the state presented no evidence of her participation in any "terrorist" actions at her 2008 trial, which lasted only a few minutes without the presence of a defense lawyer.

Following her arbitrary arrest in 2008, she was held in solitary confinement for 8 months; interrogators flogged the soles of her feet, punched her in the stomach, hit her head against a wall and threatened her with rape, in a failed effort to extract a "confession".

Four times between April and November 2020, the IRI has suddenly transferred her to different far-flung prisons. In June 2020, when she was diagnosed with COVID-19, interrogators from the ministry of intelligence told her that unless she makes videotaped “confessions” repenting and agrees to work with them, they will continue to deny her access to health care and keep her far from her family home.

At 20 years old, Saba Kord Afshari participated in protests against the compulsory hijab in 2018. When her mother, Raheleh Ahmadi, made videos on social media protesting the arrest, she too was arrested, and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for "conspiracy and collusion against national security" for speaking to “dissident” media.

Deputy Director of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, she is one of the most prominent Iranian human rights activists. She has been arrested repeatedly and sentenced heavily for objecting the death penalty and defending the rights of political prisoners. After serving 5 years of a 10-year sentence, she was subject to repeated harassment and assault, yet continued to protest defiantly and spearheading a major lawsuit against solitary confinement. In November 2021 she was rearrested in retaliation for her filing a complaint against the Evin Prison Director, who personally beat her in prison for organizing a nonviolent sit-in.

Sam Rajabi is an environmental rights defender and member of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF), a non-profit environmental organization, which had been managed by Kavous Seyed-Emami, the Iranian sociologist who died in custody in suspicious circumstances. Sam Rajabi also worked as an interpreter for other international environmental organizations.

After suffering COVID-19 in prison and the death of his mother, he was granted a brief temporary parole in March 2021.

A labor rights activist who splits his time between England and Iran, Mehran was arrested in October 2020 during a wave of arbitrary detentions ahead of anniversary of 2019 uprising. He was held in solitary confinement without any contact with a lawyer or close family member for five months, until the eve of his first court appearance.

Currently on medical furlough.

Arrested Oct 16, 2020, during the wave of arbitrary arrests ahead of the anniversary of the November 2019 uprising, she was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison. Bahareh is 43 years old and works as a nurse; she suffers from lung disease due to contact with ill patients.

Nasrin acted as the lawyer for women’s rights activists who protested against the compulsory veiling in Iran. For years, she has defended activists for trade union and human rights struggles, and religious minorities such as Bahai.

A 66-year-old Iranian-German citizen, Nahid Taghavi is a retired architect and women’s rights activist who was arbitrarily arrested in October 2020 during a wave of detentions ahead of the anniversary of the November 2020 uprising. She spent 194 days in solitary confinement and was interrogated 80 times for a total of 1,000 hours, all without legal counsel or medical treatment for her diabetes and hypertension.