Iranwire – Zia Nabavi, a former student activist currently imprisoned for protesting the poisoning of schoolgirls, must now serve an additional year in prison.
The news comes from his lawyer, Amir Raeisian, who spoke to Shargh newspaper.

According to Raeisian, this latest sentence stems from Nabavi’s protest against the downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane in 2020. The verdict has now been finalized and sent for implementation.
For years, civil activists in Iran have faced a haunting reality. While they know when they enter prison, their release date remains a moving target, constantly pushed further by new cases filed against them while they are still behind bars.
Nabavi’s journey through Iran’s prison system began during his undergraduate years.
His first arrest came in 2007 during a hunger strike by student activists. A year later, he was branded with “three stars” – a designation that barred him from continuing his education.
In response, he co-founded the Council in Defense of the Right to Education alongside other banned students. However, his activism led to another arrest during the 2009 protests against the presidential election results.
Zia’s latest sentence stems from student protests in January 2020, following the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane with two missiles, killing all 176 people aboard.
Many of the victims were former Iranian university students who had migrated to Canada in pursuit of a normal life.
In September 2024, Zia faced yet another case – this time, for reporting on bed bugs in Evin Prison. He was charged with “spreading false information.”
Although Zia’s one-year sentence for protesting the Ukrainian plane downing was confirmed long ago, it was not implemented until now – just as he was approaching release from his previous sentence with only a month or two remaining.
The Islamic Republic’s judiciary has decided to keep him behind prison walls once again.
A former political prisoner speaking to IranWire says that in Iran, it is now considered exceptional if a political prisoner is actually released after completing their sentence.
They explain that during imprisonment, prison officials do everything in their power to fabricate additional cases against civil activists.
“Prison officials even take revenge on death row inmates at the gallows, let alone civil, student, and human rights activists, whom they consider long-standing enemies of themselves and the regime,” the former prisoner adds.
Since 2009, when Zia was sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison, he has spent more time behind the walls of various Iranian prisons – from Shiban Prison in Ahvaz to Evin in Tehran – than he has spent outside, studying and living his life.
He is not the first political prisoner to spend years of his youth in detention.
The number of civil activists who entered prison with sentences under five years but have not been released – or were released only to be sentenced to longer terms in new cases – is growing daily.
Narges Mohammadi, Maryam Akbari-Monfared, Bahareh Hedayat, Mohammad Nourizad, Fatemeh Sepehri, Mohammad Hossein Sepehri, and Zartosht Ahmadi are among the civil activists who have endured back-to-back prison terms in recent years.
But this list is not complete. Several family members seeking justice for recent protests have also been imprisoned for years through repeated case-building.
Manouchehr Bakhtiari and Nahid Shirpisheh, the parents of Pouya Bakhtiari – who was killed in the November 2019 protests – are among them.
According to the latest verdict, Manouchehr Bakhtiari has been sentenced to an additional 13 months and 15 days in prison – the maximum punishment for “spreading false information” – while already serving his previous sentence in Qazvin’s Choubindar Prison.
A civil activist in Iran, speaking anonymously to IranWire for security reasons, explains that building cases against political prisoners is much easier when they are already inside prison than when they are free.
This is why security institutions, working closely with prison officials, are reluctant to let go of the opportunity they have.
“Everything a prisoner does is under the prison guard’s microscope,” they explain. “From eating and dressing to conversations with friends, from protesting injustice to defending a cellmate’s right to make phone calls or even visiting the clinic.”
According to this former political prisoner and civil activist, this constant surveillance provides prison officials with an excuse to extend sentences and silence political prisoners.
“Without exaggeration, they see it as an opportunity. They know that a political prisoner will resist oppression even outside prison, so they try to fabricate excuses and condemn them to more prison time while they are inside and cut off from the world.”
They added: “In the Islamic Republic, prison is for revenge. Since prison guards have free rein and no oversight, they can build cases against anyone they dislike – and they generally dislike most political prisoners.
“I remember one inmate who drew protest artwork. Nobody could even see these drawings in prison, but they confiscated them and wanted to charge him with propaganda against the Islamic Republic.”
Regarding amnesty directives typically issued around the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, they said: “Preventing political prisoners from receiving amnesty is another tactic to keep them behind bars.
“They use it as a threat hanging over prisoners’ heads, but ultimately, through biased reports and case-building, they prevent prisoners from benefiting even from these minimal opportunities.”
They were referring to the “amnesty order” issued by the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, which, for example, was heavily publicized in 2022 as a move to release thousands of detained protesters.
However, it later emerged that the judiciary had forced these young detainees to sign repentance letters, and many political prisoners and protest detainees were excluded from this directive.