Arash Sadeghi is an Iranian human rights defender and former student activist who was first arrested on 09 July 2009 in front of Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran in the aftermath of the contested 2009 presidential election. He was rearrested later that year and again in June 2016, when Tehran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to a total of 19 years in prison on charges including “gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security”, “spreading propaganda against the system”, “insulting the founder of the Islamic Republic” and “publishing lies in cyberspace”, and activated a suspended sentence from prior convictions. During his imprisonment, he was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer (chondrosarcoma) and subjected to prolonged solitary confinement, denial of medical care including surgery delays, hunger strikes (notably a 71‑day hunger strike in late 2016 protesting the arrest of his wife, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee), which resulted in irreversible organ damage and paralysis in one limb. He was released unexpectedly on 01 May 2021 after serving five and half years under Iran’s sentence reduction law, but was re‑arrested on 12 October 2022 amid the nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death and taken to Evin Prison where UN experts raised alarm on 02 December 2022 about his life‑threatening cancer and lack of access to medication. Arash Sadeghi was released on bail on 21 January 2023, but was subsequently tried in absentia and sentenced to five years and eight months in prison, plus an eight‑month ban on propaganda, a two‑year travel ban, a two‑year prohibition on online activity and presence in Tehran, some of which were reduced on appeal to three years and seven months for the main charge while other restrictions remained and were upheld on 14 September 2023. Though authorities have deemed him unfit to begin serving his sentence due to his critical health condition. Most recently, on 30 June 2025, he was detained and brutally beaten by IRGC‑affiliated agents in a park in Tehran (sustaining facial injuries including a broken tooth) but was released the same day as authorities appeared to be deterred by the severity of his condition.