Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi
| Photo Credit: VIA REUTERS

Iran’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Narges Mohammadi, has been sentenced to another year in prison over her activism, her lawyer said Wednesday.

Mostafa Nili, Mohammadi’s lawyer, said that his client was convicted on a charge of making propaganda against the system. Nili said the sentence came after Ms. Mohammadi urged voters to boycott Iran’s recent parliamentary election, sent letters to lawmakers in Europe and made comments regarding torture and sexual assault suffered by another Iranian journalist and political activist.

Ms. Mohammadi is being held at Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, which houses political prisoners and those with Western ties. She already had been serving a 30-month sentence, to which 15 more months were added in January. Iran’s government has not acknowledged her additional sentencing.

The latest verdict reflects the Iranian theocracy’s anger that she was awarded the Nobel prize last October for years of activism despite a decadeslong government campaign targeting her.

Ms. Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the second Iranian woman after human rights activist Shirin Ebadi in 2003. Mohammadi, 52, has kept up her activism despite numerous arrests by Iranian authorities and years behind bars.

In November, Ms. Mohammadi went on a hunger strike over being blocked along with other inmates from getting medical care and to protest the country’s mandatory headscarves for women.

Ms. Mohammadi was a leading light for nationwide, women-led protests sparked by the death last year of a 22-year-old woman in police custody that have grown into one of the most intense challenges to Iran’s theocratic government. That woman, Mahsa Amini, had been detained for allegedly not wearing her headscarf to the liking of authorities.

For observant Muslim women, the head covering is a sign of piety before God and modesty in front of men outside their families. In Iran, the hijab — and the all-encompassing black chador worn by some — has long been a political symbol as well, particularly after becoming mandatory in the years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

While women in Iran hold jobs, academic positions and even government appointments, their lives are tightly controlled, in part by laws like the mandatory hijab. Iran and neighboring Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are the only countries to mandate the headscarves. Since Amini’s death, however, more women are choosing not to wear hijab despite an increasing campaign by authorities targeting them and businesses serving them.

Paris:

Iranian authorities have prevented jailed Iranian Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi from attending the burial ceremony of her father who died earlier this week, her family said Thursday.

Karim Mohammadi, who had not seen his daughter for almost two years, died on Tuesday aged 90. He was buried earlier Thursday in the city of Zanjan northwest of Tehran.

“Heartbreakingly, Narges Mohammadi was denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony and bid her final farewell to her father,” her family said in a statement.

The family had previously said it was Mohammadi’s “unequivocal right” to attend her father’s funeral.

Mohammadi, 51, was last year awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her campaign for human rights in Iran which has seen her spend much of the last two decades in and out of jail.

She now been incarcerated since November 2021 and has not seen her Paris-based husband and twin children for several years. Last year, she was also deprived of the right to make telephone calls from prison even to relatives inside Iran and this has yet to be restored.

The family said the restrictions meant that she had not seen her father for 22 months and had not spoken to him by phone for the last three months. Even on the day he died “she wasn’t allowed to make a call to offer condolences to her family.”

The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran cited her father as saying a few days before he died: “The longing to hear my daughter’s voice from the prison of the oppressor is unbearable.”

Mohammadi has been hit with a string of extra convictions while behind bars, the latest an additional sentence of more than one year in prison on charges of spreading propaganda against the Islamic republic while in prison.

According to her family, her sentences now amount to 12 years and three months of imprisonment, 154 lashes, two years of exile, and various social and political restrictions.

But there has been no let-up in Mohammadi’s campaigning despite her incarceration.

She has expressed dismay over the surge of executions in Iran while backing the protests that erupted from September 2022 after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, for allegedly violating Iran’s strict female dress code.

A vehement opponent of the head covering required of women in the Islamic republic, Mohammadi has also defied rules about wearing the headscarf inside prison.

“The Iranian people have turned the page on this regime,” she told France’s Le Monde daily in an interview published on Thursday. “I think at the earliest opportunity people will return to the street.”

Her comments came a day before Iran holds on Friday elections for parliament and the key Assembly of Experts.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Iranian human rights activist and the vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) Narges Mohammadi has been chosen for the Peace Nobel.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi has been chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy for the coveted 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.

“The 2023 peace laureate Narges Mohammadi is a woman, a human rights advocate, and a freedom fighter. This year’s NobelPeacePrize also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women,” the Academy said.

Last year, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties.

Ms. Mohammadi is currently lodged in a prison in Iran. In fact, the Iranian regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes.

The motto adopted by the Iranian demonstrators – “Woman – Life – Freedom” – suitably expresses the dedication and work of Narges Mohammadi, the Academy said.

Ms. Mohammadi advocates against death penalty in a country that reports most state executions. A strong advocate of women’s rights since her days as a college student.

Ms. Mohammadi was arrested for the first time in 2011 for her efforts to assist incarcerated activists and their families.

Two years later, after her release on bail, Ms Mohammadi immersed herself in a campaign against use of the death penalty. This lead to her re-arrest in 2015.

Upon her return to prison, she began opposing the regime’s systematic use of torture and sexualised violence against political prisoners, especially women, that is practised in Iranian prisons.

When Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini was killed by Iranian morality police when she was in custody for not covering her head, Iran witnessed one of the largest anti-government protests. Many protestors were lodged in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran, where Ms. Mohammadi was an inmate.

From prison she expressed support for the demonstrators and organised solidarity actions among her fellow inmates. The prison authorities responded by imposing even stricter conditions. She was prohibited from receiving calls and visitors. She, however, managed to smuggle out an article which the New York Times published on the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s killing, which highlighted the shocking condition of the women inmates, the torture, abuse and solitary confinement they are subjected to.

In 2018, Mohammadi, an engineer and physicist, was awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize, which recognizes outstanding leadership or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights. She was close to Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who founded the banned Defenders of Human Rights Center, and currently its vice president.

The Nobel Prize announcements kicked off on October 2 with the Physiology or Medicine Nobel jointly awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

Explained | All about the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced on October 3 that the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electro dynamics in matter”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is shared by three scientists – Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

The Nobel announcements will draw to a close on October 9 with the announcement of Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as Economic sciences Nobel.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.