Mehregan was arrested on August 26, 2015, at the Passport Office in Tehran and was sent to Evin Prison to begin serving a one-year prison sentence he was given in 2012. He was convicted of “propagating against the state” and sentenced to one year in prison and a five-year ban from “journalistic, political, cultural or cyber activities.”
In a Facebook post on August 26, 2015, Mehregan’s wife, Afsaneh Parchekani, wrote that the journalist’s 2012 conviction was in connection with his work as the political editor of the reformist daily Sharq. In December 2010, Mehregan and several other journalists were arrested at Sharq headquarters. Following Iran’s disputed presidential election in June 2009, many opposition newspapers had shut down. On the day that Sharq was raided, the newspaper published a special section called “The Student Movement is Alive.”
Mehregan has been briefly imprisoned several times in the past few years. He was also arrested in June 2013 after he attended the funeral of Hoda Saber, a jailed Iranian journalist and activist who died of a heart attack after a hunger strike in Evin Prison. In December 2009, when Mehregan was the political editor of the reformist daily Etemad, he was arrested and held for one month after he discussed the government’s press policies in an interview with Deutsche Welle’s Persian service. He was released on bail.
It is not clear if Mehregan is appealing the conviction.