Ehsan Mansouri is an Iranian student journalist and a cartoonist at the Amirkabir University of Technology. Tehran authorities arrested him on May 22, 2007, following the distribution of newsletters carrying articles deemed insulting to Islam. He was released from Evin Prison on August 13, 2008, after being granted a conditional release.
The students—all members of the reformist Islamic Student Association—said they were not involved in the publications. They claimed that student members of the Basij—a militia affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guard, an elite unit under the supreme leader's control—fraudulently used the names and logos of legitimate student publications as a dirty trick designed to disrupt the group's annual campus election. Immediately following distribution of the newsletters, the Basij attacked the publications and their activist leaders.
The students were subjected to torture during interrogations, according to news reports quoting their families. Mansouri was specifically a cartoonist accused of drawing insulting caricatures within the pages of the forged publications. During their judicial proceedings, defense attorney Mohammad Ali Dadkhah maintained that the prosecution lacked credible evidence and that the students' initial confessions had been extracted under severe duress and torture.
In October, a Tehran Revolutionary Court found all three students guilty of propaganda against the regime and insulting the supreme leader, according to AUTNews. Dadkhah told AUTNews that the court sentenced Mansouri to two years in prison. All three appealed the verdict. Dadkhah added that they still faced charges in criminal court of insulting the Prophet Muhammad and Islamic principles. Although a public criminal court later dropped those separate charges and ordered their release on bail in December 2007, prison officials refused to free them pending the final appeals process, and an appellate court upheld their primary sentences in April 2008.
On August 13, 2008, Mansouri was conditionally released from Tehran's notorious Evin Prison. He had spent approximately 449 days in detention.