Just over a year after the young Mahsa Amini died in police custody, precipitating a violently repressed popular uprising in Iran, on Friday, October 6, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned in the jails of the Islamic Republic.
The 51-year-old journalist is being rewarded " for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all," insisted the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, in Oslo, as she called on Teheran to release from prison.
A tireless Iranian human rights defender, Mohammadi sacrificed everything to continue her fight in Iran. When her husband and activist Taghi Rahmani decided to leave the country in 2012 after years of imprisonment, she decided not to follow in his footsteps. Their twin children, Ali and Kiana, remained in Iran until 2015 before joining their father in Paris. "Like the mother of Moses, I entrusted my two children to the River Nile," she wrote at the time in a letter from the infamous Evin prison, north of Tehran, where she was serving a six-year prison sentence. Her twins were only eight years old at the time. Since then, Mohammadi has seen neither her children nor her husband. Her life has been marked by arrests, threats, and constant pressure from the Iranian secret services.
For many years, Mohammadi was the spokesperson for the Defenders of Human Rights Center, founded in 2003 by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and lawyer Shirin Ebadi. Bringing together leading Iranian lawyers such as Nasrin Sotoudeh (winner of the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Human Rights in 2012), the group's mission was to support and defend political prisoners and their families, in addition to raising Iranian society's awareness about its rights.
Mohammadi was arrested for the first time in 2010, a year after the ultraconservative former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) was fraudulently reelected. She was sentenced to six years in prison for her activities within this organization. In 2012, the journalist was released after being deemed unable to endure detention due to physical and neurological problems. She immediately took up the fight again. In 2013, she signed the "Campaign for Step by Step Abolition of the Death Penalty" petition, which led to her re-arrest a year later and a ten-year prison sentence. She claims to have been mistreated and abused by her prison guards on several occasions. Her multiple and lengthy stays in prison caused neurological disorders that resulted in muscular paralysis.
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