Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on Thursday, January 23, called for an "end" to the Islamic republic and urged human rights to be a precondition of any negotiation with Tehran as she addressed French lawmakers in a rare encounter with an Iran-based activist. Mohammadi, 52, had been in prison for over three years but was released in December for a limited period on medical leave. Her legal team has warned she could be re-arrested and sent back to jail at any time. She won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her two-decade fight for human rights in the Islamic republic and strongly backed the 2022-2023 protests sparked by the custody death of the Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini.

"Any negotiations with the Islamic republic that do not take into account the fundamental rights of the Iranian people will only strengthen religious tyranny," she told the women's rights committees of the French Sénat and Assemblée Nationale in a joint session via video link from Tehran. "I believe in the need to end the Islamic republic," she added.

Mohammadi appeared healthy and, as usual in her public appearances, defiantly did not wear the headscarf that is obligatory for all women under the Islamic republic's dress code. She was flanked by pictures of Amini and her two Paris-based twin children, who picked up the Nobel prize in Oslo on her behalf but whom she has not seen for the last decade. Asked about the risks of her participating in this video conference, Mohammadi replied that it was "no difference being on one side or the other of the prison wall." Her release in December from Evin prison marked the first time Mohammadi, who has spent much of the past decade behind bars, has been free since she was arrested in November 2021.