Ali-Reza Beheshti Shirazi, an advisor to Mir-Hossein Mousavi in his first term as prime minister in the late 1980s, was arrested after the presidential elections of 2009, which Mousavi contested and lost in the disputed vote, and was later sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Shirazi was cabinet secretary during Mousavi’s premiership. After resigning from his government positions, he founded Rozane Publications and withdrew from politics until Mousavi announced his 2009 candidature for presidency.

However, after Mousavi was linked to the presidency, Shirazy also became the Editor-in-Chief of Green Word which was aligned with the ideas of Mousavi. After the events of the 2009 presidential election, Shirazi was once arrested in June and then again in January 2010. His second arrest led to a sentence of five years in prison.

Ten days after the election, on June 23, Shirazi was arrested after a security forces raid on the editorial offices of the Kaleme Sabz newspaper headquarters. He was later released on bail.

On December 28, with Shirazi’s second arrest after the events of the Ashura commemorations of 2009, he was charged with “actions against national security.” He spent 74 days in solitary confinement in Section 209 of Evin Prison and was subjected to interrogation and intense pressure. One of the pressures put on him through this period was the temporary detention and interrogation of his son, Sayyid Sadr al-Din, who was taken from his place of work on February 11, 2010. After he was arrested, he was eventually able to have short meetings with his family.

On May 31, 2010, Shirazi met with Jafari Dawlat-Abadi, then attorney general of Tehran, to protest against his arrest in a security section of the prison, his several month long detention in solitary confinement and his interrogation. After meeting with the Attorney Dawlat-Abadi, Shirazi was transferred from Section 209 to Section 7 of Evin Prison. But after a short period in July 2010, he was moved to Section 350.

After spending nine month in prison, Shirazi was released on a bail of 500 million tomans.

His case was heard in October 2010 in Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court presided over by Judge Pir-Abbasi on the accusation of “actions against national security” and he was sentenced to five years imprisonment.

On July 12, 2011, he was summoned to Evin Prison to serve out the remaining four years and three months of his five year sentence. On July 23, 2015, with only a month remaining of his sentence, he was included in the Eid Al-Fitr pardon list and released from prison.