Reza Khandan is behind bars again. The Iranian activist and husband of leading human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh isn't even allowed to call his family.

"He was arrested because six years ago he spoke out against the mandatory headscarf [hijab]," Sotoudeh told DW.

Sotoudeh suspects that the Iranian authorities are trying to send a signal with his arrest, not just to put her under pressure but as a warning to all critics of the Iranian regime.

Sotoudeh, who was awarded the European Union's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2012, has been fighting for human rights in Iran for more than 25 years. She is one of the best known voices from within Iranian civil society and her husband, Khandan, a graphic designer by trade, has stood by her side and advocated for human rights for years, too.

In Iran, it has been mandatory for women to wear a headscarf, or hijab, covering their hair since the 1979 revolution that brought a strict theocratic government to power. In recent years, increasing numbers of local women have chosen not to wear hijabs and the rule has also sparked protests.

"In 2018, along with other activists, Reza designed buttons that said, 'I'm against mandatory hijab'," Sotoudeh recounts. "He was arrested for that and in 2019, he was sentenced to six years imprisonment. The case was later officially closed but in mid-December 2024, he was arrested again."

Sotoudeh had been held in Iran's notorious Evin prison herself between 2018 and 2023 because she defended some younger women who had protested about the mandatory hijab rules in public. At the time she was sentenced to 38 and a half years in jail and 148 lashes. But due to a heart condition and asthma, Sotoudeh was released from prison on parole in November 2023.

She knows she could be arrested again at any time, but she says she won't let that stop her work. In the middle of January, Sotoudeh and Sedigheh Vasmaghi, an Islamic scholar and women's rights activist, published a petition. In it they called for the end of the death penalty in Iran as well as the end of mandatory hijabs and violence against women who protest against the rule. The petition argued the hijab rule was a political tool above all, one used to repress women of Iran.

"The political system is afraid that protests could flare up again," Sotoudeh told DW.

In 2022, Iran was roiled by major protests that came after the September death of Iranian-Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini, who died while she was in custody for not wearing a headscarf.

"That's why the judiciary is trying to intimidate activists," Sotoudeh explained.

In 2022, the protests were brutally suppressed and to this day, there are almost daily reports about civil society activists being arrested.

On March 4, 2025, Iranian-British journalist and film maker Bahman Daroshafaei wrote on his Instagram account that civil society activist Marzieh Ghaffari had been arrested in mid-February. After 17 days of solitary confinement she was transferred to the women's section of Evin prison, he wrote.

Ghaffari had been volunteering with a culture group, Sizdah Aban, based in southern Tehran for about 25 years, Daroshafaei said. Part of her work there involved pregnant women and children. The reasons for her arrest are not known.

At the end of February, human rights activist Ali Abdi was also put behind bars. He had previously lived in exile in the US; his research focused on social movements, migration and political transformation. In 2023, he returned to Tehran to visit his mother, but was arrested and taken to court. Abdi then posted a video on his Telegram channel reporting that he had been sentenced to 12 years in prison. The former student activist said he was imprisoned because of, among other things, articles he had written years ago about protests in Iran and about gender.

Alireza Bakhtiar is one of many Iranians who have family members in prison.

"My father is still behind bars," Bakhtiar told DW.

His father is Mohammad Bagher Bakhtiar, a former military man and senior member of Iran's feared Revolutionary Guards. In mid-February, Bakhtiar's father and a group of other war veterans held a silent protest in front of Tehran University.

One of their objectives was to protest the house arrest of opposition politician Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife Zahra Rahnavard. Both have been under house arrest, without trial, since 2011. Back then Mousavi, who was once Iran's prime minister himself, openly disputed the results of the 2009 presidential election, sided with demonstrators and sparked what came to be known as the Green Movement in Iranian opposition politics.

Some of the veterans who took part in the protest also fought in the Iran-Iraq war that went from 1980 to 1988. They were celebrated as heroes at home. Many of them, however, had long been becoming more critical of increasing political repression and in particular the violent way that the protests after Jina Mahsa Amini's death were handled. The group also called for all political prisoners to be freed.

The fact that a group like this should become a target for the Iranian authorities is regarded as a sign for how much the regime is worried about a new wave of protests. The veterans' mid-February protest was brutally suppressed and hundreds of those at the demonstration were arrested, including former officer Bakhtiar.

"Because of his critical stance on the political system, my father received several death threats," his son told DW. "As a soldier, he defended his country and this population for eight years during the war. Now he sees it as his duty to stand up against the oppression of civil society."

This story was originally written in German.