For eight long and often desperate years, Saeed Malekpour has been locked in the dungeonlike cells of Iran’s Evin Prison, condemned for crimes he did not commit.

The 41-year-old Canadian resident has seen others come and go. Some have been granted “furloughs” from prison to rejoin relatives and seek medical attention. Other prisoners have been pardoned or had their sentences cut.

But all of Malekpour’s pleas have been rejected under the direction of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, the enforcers of the clerical regime.

They are in charge of an expanding campaign to clamp down on use of the Internet and social media. The arrest of Malekpour — an engineer and web designer — aimed to make an example of him through accusations that he worked for “foreign powers” to undermine the clerical regime by masterminding an online pornography network: charges that even the Iranian courts could not substantiate.

“Saeed and his lawyer requested a furlough but the prosecutor would not agree,” said his sister Maryam Malekpour, who will speak out for him at an event at the University of Toronto on Feb. 3. “Now both the prosecutor and the prison warden have agreed, but the Revolutionary Guards are opposed,” she said.

She will join a group of high-profile advocates who are launching a campaign to ramp up pressure to free Malekpour — and urge the Canadian government to use its leverage to demand his release.

It is a crucial year for Iran’s international relations, including an upcoming presidential election, a struggle over the nuclear deal that eased crippling sanctions, and negotiations to restore diplomatic ties with Ottawa.

Speakers will include former political prisoners Homa Hoodfar and Malekpour’s former cellmate Mostafa Azizi, who have spoken little about their ordeals until now.

Mohamed Fahmy, a journalist and former political prisoner in Egypt, will join them, along with former Iranian prisoner Hamid Ghassemi-Shall, MP and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler, members of all political parties and Amnesty International Secretary General Alex Neve.

“Saeed was a victim of the system and he should be released now,” said Azizi, a Toronto-based filmmaker who was arrested in January 2015 on charges that included insulting the country’s supreme leader. He was freed in an amnesty after 15 months in prison — six of them spent in the cellblock where Malekpour is now held.

“Saeed has breathing problems, he has been through torture but he is trying to keep up his spirits,” Azizi said. “He is hopeful that he will come out soon. But that won’t happen unless he gets support from the government, and from people outside and inside Iran.”

Both men are Canadian permanent residents, a category Ottawa says makes it difficult for the government to intervene. Canada’s severed diplomatic relations with Iran have added to the problems.

But with Ottawa attempting to restore relations, advocates say, it is the best time for the Trudeau government to press for Malekpour’s release as part of the negotiations.

“It’s a re-engagement from which the Revolutionary Guards will benefit the most,” said human rights advocate Maryam Nayeb Yazdi, founder of the Persian2English site.

“For the past eight years Saeed has had no access to a lawyer,” she said. “His basic rights have been repeatedly violated and he has never received a fair trial. This is not the profile of a guilty man, but of a political hostage. Hostage-takers do not release their victims without an incentive.” Among other things, Iranians would benefit from easing of difficulties in obtaining visas if relations were restored.

Homa Hoodfar, a Canadian citizen and professor emeritus at Concordia University, who was arrested during a visit to Iran last year, believes she was a pawn in an ongoing power struggle between factions of the murky regime.

Charged with “dabbling in feminism and security matters,” she was released in October after 112 days of imprisonment and constant threats from interrogators. The detention was all the more alarming because another Iranian-born Canadian, photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, died after torture in the same prison in 2003.

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Since then, hardliners’ suspicions of expat Iranians have increased, and a number have been arrested and imprisoned on widely-decried espionage and subversion charges. They have also been used to play out rivalries between factions who want to see more openness to the world, and those who fear a loss of power if they loosen their grip.

“In my case, I knew initially that they disliked the vice-president for women’s affairs,” said Hoodfar. “They wanted to show I had been guiding her in running a campaign for women in the parliamentary election. I met her once, by chance, and if I saw her in the street I wouldn’t recognize her.”

Hoodfar said that her captors “kept talking (aggressively) about dual nationals,” making it clear that they opposed entry of people that they believed were allied with reformers.

She was released in October on “humanitarian grounds” after Ottawa called on Iranian ally Oman for help.

No such efforts have so far been made for Malekpour.

Both Hoodfar and Azizi say that much more must be done to obtain his release — both by the Trudeau government and the public. Under the Harper government, an all-party vote to save Malekpour from a death sentence was followed by its reduction to life in prison.

“I believe I was released because of lobbying both inside and outside Iran,” said Azizi. “I was very well known as a TV producer and screen writer. I was connected to the arts and cinema community. Saeed was never well known, he’s just an accidental victim. Without pressure, he has no one on his side.”

Malekpour’s imprisonment has served its purpose for his jailers, Azizi added. “They are done with him. But he needs pressure from the international community to be released. The time is right.”

Malekpour has already suffered too much, he said. Now held in a grimy cell with up to 30 others, and given “food so bad it would often end up in the garbage,” he is struggling to survive from day to day. “In the years when he was tortured and under an execution order, the pressure was unbearable. In that situation, every day you think you’ll die.”

Campaign to Free Saeed Malekpour will feature a panel of speakers from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 3, at the University of Toronto Earth Sciences Centre, 5 Bancroft Ave., room 1050.

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