Akbar Ganji is an Iranian writer, journalist and political activist. He has won a number of awards including the Golden Pen Award from the World Association of Newspapers, the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders and the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty from the Cato Institute.

From the beginning of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ganji was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). But he later opposed the continuation of the Iran-Iraq war after the recapture of the Iranian city of Khorramshahr – a key turning point in the war. In 1983, during a public speech he made at the Vali-e Asr garrison in front of Mohsen Rezaei, then commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, Ganji objected to the policy of continuing the war, calling it useless.

In that same speech, which caused serious conflict within the ranks of the IRGC, Ganji also accused a number of Revolutionary Guards commanders, including Mohsen Rezaei, Mohsen Rafiqdoost, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr and Mohammad Hossein Zibaeinejad, of using the IRGC as a tool for achieving the aims of the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution Organization – an early post-revolutionary groups which supported the Revolution's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and held significant power in post-revolutionary Iranian politics – and of using the IRGC's forces to carry out political operations. Ganji went on to demand Rezaei's removal.

Ganji’s speech was welcomed by the forces of the Mohammad Rasulullah Division of the Revolutionary Guards, an important provincial division based in Tehran, and the speech caused tension between this division and the IRGC top command. 

The IRGC called the speech an act of mutiny during war time and called for the death sentence to be handed down against Ganji. But this sentence was ruled out through the mediation of senior clerics Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri and Ayatollah Yousef Sanei.

Akbar Ganji resigned from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1984. He later became the cultural liaison for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Embassy in Turkey for several years.

In the early 1990s, Ganji joined the Kian Circle, a collective of Iranian intellectuals and thinkers. The future president Mohammad Khatami, the journalist Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, and a number of other reformist members of the Kayhan newspaper, created a newspaper called Kian after splitting from Kayhan. Ganji became a regular contributor to Kian newspaper.

With Mohammad Khatami’s victory in the 1997 presidential elections, his allies, including Akbar Ganji, gained widespread recognition as reformists. Iranian reformists advocate political modernization or reform within the Islamic Republic system.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Akbar Ganji wrote a number of notable books. His works included The Dungeon of Ghosts and The Red Eminence and the Grey Eminences about the notorious Chain Murders – the assassinations of critics of the Islamic Republic by Ministry of Intelligence agents between 1988 and 1998. His books also included other revelations of actions by the Islamic Republic including allegations over the murder of Iranian dissidents, widespread economic and moral corruption in the country, and the repression of domestic and foreign dissidents.

The Red Eminence and the Grey Eminences, which was published in 2000, was reprinted 54 times in Iran in just two years. But after the April 2000 events of the Berlin "Iran after the elections" conference, which was attended by Ganji and later disrupted by the protests of anti-regime Iranian exiles, and Ganji's consequent arrest and trial in Iran, both this book and The Dungeon of Ghosts were banned.
 
The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting Network (IRIB) further politicized the conference by broadcasting certain excerpts from interviews with Iranian speakers at the meeting. The network also showed scenes from the conference in which a man was stripped naked, a woman was shown dancing, and protesters who chanted "Death to the Islamic Republic." All Iranian participants and demonstrators at the conference, who were resident in Iran, were later summoned and interrogated by the Iranian authorities.
 
Akbar Ganji was tried in court hearings presided over by Saeed Mortazavi on charges of attending the Berlin conference and other security-related charges. He was subsequently sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and five years in exile. Two years later, the Court of Appeals reduced his sentence to six months imprisonment. But the Tehran Prosecutor's Office protested against the Court of Appeals’ decision and Ganji was eventually sentenced to six years imprisonment. He was forced to serve the entirety of this sentence.
 
During these court hearings, Akbar Ganji publicly declared that Hojjatoleslam Ali Fallahian, the former Minister of Intelligence during Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s 1989-1997 government, was “Master Key,” a codename for one of the leading perpetrators of the Chain Murders that Ganji had used throughout his investigative reporting. Ganji also denounced several other clerics by name, including Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, for having encouraged or issued the fatwas supporting the assassinations. He also stated that Yazdi had the codename “His Grey Excellency” in his works.

In 2002, during his time in prison, Ganji wrote a pamphlet called The Republican Manifesto in which he discussed the ineffectiveness of the reformist movement in the Islamic Republic and ways out of the political dead-end faced by Iranian republicans.

Ganji also went on a 13-day hunger strike in protest at the lack of prison leave. He initially said the hunger strike would be indefinite but later agreed to end the action. 

He was finally granted leave from prison. Ganji then gave several interviews to foreign international news agencies, in which defended the separation of religion and state, and called for the establishment of a secular Republic of Iran. The authorities returned Ganji to prison as a result and he went on a fresh 70-day hunger strike.

Many Iranians from around the world, as well as Western leaders, came out in support of Akbar Ganji. The American president George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan were among the prominent international figures who called for Ganji’s release.

Following the deterioration of his physical condition and the publication of photographs of Akbar Ganji, in which he was shown to be in a critical condition in prison, the then prosecutor-general of Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi, ordered that Ganji be transferred to Milad Hospital. He was released from prison after having served the entirety of his six-year prison sentence. He left Iran a few months later.

Ganji initially said his trip was temporary and that he would return. During this time abroad, he received the Golden Pen Award of the World Association of Newspapers at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Russia, after which in Italy he received the Silver Flag of Florence, where officials said Ganji was "a pioneer of freedom," and made him an honorary citizen of the city. Ganji has been compared to South Africa's Nelson Mandela and the former Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel. He later traveled to France, Canada and the United States, where he received numerous awards and spoke at US and Canadian universities as well as the European Parliament.

In an interview with BBC Persian, on December 7, 2010, Akbar Ganji said: “The Chain Murders in Iran were a government project and the Supreme Leader of Iran was behind it. On the direct orders of Ali Khamenei, agents from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence assassinated opponents of the Islamic Republic at home and abroad.”