Iranian Narges Mohammadi wins 2023 Nobel Peace Prize – DW – 10/06/2023

Iranian campaigner Narges Mohammadi has for decades campaigned on the most sensitive issues in the Islamic Republic.

She has opposed pillars of the clerical system including capital punishment and the obligatory hijab, and defiantly refuses to give up her campaigning even behind bars.

She has not seen her children for eight years, has spent most of her recent life in prison and acknowledges there is no immediate prospect of release.

First arrested 22 years ago, the 51-year-old has spent much of the past two decades in and out of jail over her unstinting campaigning for human rights in Iran.

She has most recently been incarcerated since November 2021.

Born in 1972 in Zanjan, in the northwest of Iran, Mohammadi studied physics before becoming an engineer.

But she then launched a new career in journalism, working for newspapers that were at the time part of the reformist movement.

In the 2000s, she joined the Center for Human Rights Defenders, founded by the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, fighting in particular for the abolition of the death penalty.

In her book “White Torture”, Mohammadi denounced prisoners’ conditions of detention, in particular the use of solitary confinement, which she says she herself also suffered.

Regular updates about the situation in prison are posted on her Instagram account run by her family. 

Mohammadi told AFP in September she was currently serving a combined sentence of 10 years and nine months in prison, had also been sentenced to 154 lashes and had five cases against her linked to her activities in jail alone.

Amnesty International describes her as a prisoner of conscience who has been arbitrarily detained.

While she could only witness from behind bars the protests that broke out following the death in September last year, of Jina Mahsa Amini — who had been arrested for violating Iran’s strict dress rules for women — she says the movement made clear the levels of dissatisfaction in society.

Mohammadi and fellow inmates staged a symbolic protest in the yard of Evin prison by burning their headscarves during the anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death.