- She gets awarded for fight against oppression of women in the Islamic
Country - Jury said “her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal cost”
Oslo, Agencies : Jailed Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her fight against women’s oppression in Iran and advocating for human rights.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in a news conference in Oslo that “her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal cost.”
“All together 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,” she said One of Iran’s most prominent human rights activists, Mohammadi worked as an engineer and a columnist for various newspapers following her studies.
She was first arrested in 2011 for assisting jailed activists and their families. After her release she spent two years on bail then began campaigning against Iran’s death penalty laws, for which she was re-arrested in 2015.
“Upon her return to prison, she began opposing the regime’s systematic use of torture and sexualized violence against political prisons and especially women,” Reiss-Andersen said.
Mohammadi is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center which is led by the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.
“This Nobel Prize will embolden Narges’ fight for human rights, but more importantly, this is in fact a prize for the woman, life and freedom movement,” Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Ramahi, told media persons. In an audio recording from the prison aired by News channels, Mohammadi was heard leading chants of “Woman, life, freedom,” the slogan of the protests. “This period was and still is the era of greatest protest in this prison,” she told in viral audio.
Despite being behind bars, Mohammadi has rallied immense support for the women-led protests against the government that rocked Iran last year. The protests in Iran were initially triggered by the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini who died in the hospital after being detained by the country’s morality police. The unrest developed into the biggest challenge to Iran’s theocratic establishment since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In defiance of authorities, Iranian women and girls removed their headscarves in public, at times burning them. Even though the underlying human rights abuses and economic troubles still persist, the protests were stifled by the authorities who resumed their hijab patrols in July.
