Mehdi Karroubi is born on 26 September 1937 into a Shia clerical family in Aligudarz, a city in the western part of Lorestan province.
Karroubi was imprisoned several times by the government of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, during the 1970s, including a stint at the Qasr Prison in Tehran.
During his first term as speaker of Parliament, Karroubi was among the maktabi or "radical" faction of the majlis who contested the policies of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
While Rafsanjani favored foreign investment and market reforms, Karroubi and others "sought to promote mass political participation and maintain state control of the economy".
[citation needed] Karroubi and the National Trust Party support the idea of dialogue with the United States aiming at resolving long standing conflicts.
[10] Karroubi was among the reformist candidates in the presidential election of 2005, where he finished third in the vote count, closely following the front runners, ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
After the announcement of the election results, Karroubi alleged that a network of mosques, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Basij militia forces had been illegally used to generate and mobilize support for Ahmadinejad.
Karroubi responded in an open letter, resigning from all his political posts, including that as adviser to the Supreme Leader and as a member of Expediency Discernment Council, both of which he had been appointed to by Khamenei.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who ranked first in the first round, also pointed to organized and unjust interventions, alleged manipulation of the vote, and supported Karroubi's complaint.
According to a paper handed to his supporters during the campaign his main policies are: In a 2009 interview with the AFP, Karroubi also promised to expand women's rights if elected president of Iran.
[1] Among the reforms which he planned to introduce were elimination of Iran's morality police street patrols, which force an Islamic dress code on Iranian women.
According to this plan, adopted from the pro-market economist Massoud Nilli,[14] company stock and profits would be shared among Iranians above 18 years of age, without the right to sell.
Other notable supporters include: Ata'ollah Mohajerani, historian, politician, journalist, and author and former culture minister during Khatami's presidency; Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, President Khatami's chief of staff, then his vice president for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, and finally his advisor; Mohammad-Ali Najafi, Iranian politician and university professor and former minister of education; Emadeddin Baghi, the founder and head of the Committee for the Defense of Prisoners' Rights and the Society of Right to Life Guardians, and winner of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders; Abdolkarim Soroush, philosopher and professor.
[1] On 9 August 2009, in a letter to the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran, Karroubi demanded investigation of Iranian prisons for possible tortures and in particular sexual harassment of men and women.
[15] On 19 August, he wrote to parliament speaker Ali Larijani, asking to meet with him, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the state prosecutor to "personally present my documents and evidence over the cases of sexual abuse in some prisons specially Kahrizak detention center.
[19] The New York Times newspaper reported that he "has been pushed and shoved" and had a shoe thrown "at him—a grave insult in Iran"—since the election.
[21] A statement issued by conservative Iranian parliamentarians carried by the official Islamic Republic News Agency said: "Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried."
"Corrupt on earth" (Mofsed-e-filarz) is a capital crime sometimes levied against political dissidents in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
[2] He was 79 at the time and had undergone heart surgery only days earlier; he was taken to hospital after less than 24 hours and resumed eating after the government agreed to remove intelligence agents from his home.