The deaths of the prominent Iranian democracy activist Ezzatollah Sahabi, aged 81, and his campaigning daughter, Haleh, who died at his funeral, aged 54, have highlighted political tensions in Iran.

Although an opponent of the Shah, who ruled Iran until the Islamic revolution of 1979, and close to Ruhollah Khomeini when the Ayatollah returned in triumph to Iran to take power later that year, the liberal Sahabi soon backed away from the increasingly harsh Islamic regime that followed. He had been imprisoned several times by the Shah, and finally landed in a revolutionary prison as a critic of what he now saw as a corrupt and cruel regime.

Like Mehdi Bazargan, prime minister in Khomeini’s first, transitional government, Sahabi was a moderate in the revolutionary government and a gradualist in a country seeking radical change. A socialist and a key figure in the Freedom Movement of Iran (Nehzat-e Azadi-ye Iran), Sahabi believed in democracy, constitutional government and the due process of law, all of which were ignored by the revolutionary courts, which took their orders from Khomeini alone. Khomeini rejected the word “democracy” as a product of the decadent west. “Criminals,” said Khomeini, “should not be tried. They should be killed.”

Sahabi was born in Tehran and studied mechanical engineering at Tehran University. As a student, he was active in support of Mohammad Mossadegh, who as prime minister from 1951 nationalised the oil industry and was consequently ousted by the US and Britain in 1953 in their successful manoeuvre to restore the Shah. The Iran Freedom Movement, opposing the Shah, was founded in 1961 by Sahabi’s father, Yadollah, together with Bazargan and Mahmoud Taleqani, as a response to Mossadegh’s downfall. Sahabi joined the Freedom Movement immediately, was arrested in 1963, serving five years in prison and then arrested again in 1971, remaining in prison until 1978.

During his brief exile in France, in October 1978, Khomeini created a transitional team of advisers, one of whom was Sahabi. The new revolutionary government set up in Tehran in January 1979 included Sahabi, and Yadollah was commissioned to help draw up a constitution. However, Sahabi was from the start opposed to Khomeini’s concept of velayat-e faqih, the doctrine of “the guardianship of the jurisconsult” which gave Khomeini and his successors absolute power. In this, Sahabi was in tune with the majority of Shia clerics.

On 5 November 1979, the day after the American embassy in Tehran was seized by students of the Khat-e Khomeini (“Khomeini’s line”), Sahabi resigned from the government in disgust. He became a strong critic of the regime, and expressed admiration for honest clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri who, although considered a radical and a potential successor to Khomeini, bravely supported the rights of the persecuted Bahá’í community to Iranian citizenship.

Sahabi was arrested in 1990 and was reported to have been tortured by Saeed Emami, mastermind of the infamous Chain Murders of regime opponents. In 1991 Sahabi founded the weekly newspaper Iran-e farda (Iran of Tomorrow) which was closed down nine years later by regime hardliners. In April 2000, he was arrested after taking part in a conference at the Heinrich Böll Institute in Berlin at which reform in Iran was debated.

That December, he was rearrested and charged with “insulting the Guide [Khomeini]” and “propaganda against the regime”. He was released on bail in March 2002. According to the Commission on Human Rights, Sahabi was denied access to his lawyer, doctor or family after his arrest. He was believed to have been among 15 members of the Nationalist-Religious Coalition of parties to have stood trial on charges of subversive activities against the state and blasphemy, both of which carried the death penalty.

Sahabi was the founder in 2003 of the Nationalist-Religious Coalition, a successor of the Freedom Movement, and led the coalition until his death. He was married to Zahra Ataei, a maternal niece of Bazargan. Haleh, strongly influenced by her father, became a member of the Mothers for Peace group and a campaigner for women’s rights in Iran.

In 2009 she was arrested, along with other demonstrators, in front of the parliament building during the controversial second inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She was sentenced to two years in prison for spreading propaganda against the regime and disrupting public order. She had been given temporary release for her father’s funeral, held the day after his death, and died of a heart attack after being set upon by security men who were trying to remove her father’s body, and the portrait of him that she carried.

Sahabi is survived by his wife and a son. Haleh is survived by her husband, Taghi Shamekhi, a son and two daughters.

• Ezzatollah Sahabi, democracy activist, born 9 May 1930; died 31 May 2011

Source : Guardian.co.uk