2023-10-07 10:16:44
Undated photo of Narges Mohammadi, provided by his family. MOHAMMADI FAMILY ARCHIVE PHOTOS / REUTERS
A little more than a year after the death in police custody of young Mahsa Amini, who precipitated a violently repressed popular uprising in Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, on Friday October 6, to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned in the jails of the Islamic Republic.
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The 51-year-old journalist is rewarded “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight for the promotion of human rights and freedom for all”insisted the president of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, in Oslo, calling on Tehran to obtain his release.
A tireless Iranian human rights defender, Narges Mohammadi sacrificed everything to continue her fight in Iran. When her husband, Taghi Rahmani, an activist like her, decided to leave the country in 2012 after years of imprisonment, she did not want to follow suit. Their two twin children, Ali and Kiana, stayed 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 written from the infamous Evin prison in northern Tehran, where she was serving a six-year sentence. Her twins were only 8 years old at the time. Since then, Narges Mohammadi has not seen her children or her husband again. His life is punctuated by arrests, threats and constant pressure exerted by the Iranian secret services.
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Narges Mohammadi was for years the spokesperson for the Iranian Association of Human Rights Defenders, founded by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2003, lawyer Shirin Ebadi. The group, bringing together the greatest Iranian lawyers such as Nasrin Sotoudeh (Sakharov Prize in 2012, awarded by the European Parliament for human rights), had the mission of supporting and defending political prisoners and their families and raising awareness in Iranian society about his rights.
“Unfailing determination”
Narges Mohammadi was arrested for the first time in 2010, a year after the fraudulent re-election of the former president, the ultraconservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). She was sentenced to six years in prison for her activities within this association. In 2012, deemed incapable of withstanding detention due to physical and neurological problems, the journalist was released. She immediately goes back into battle. She was a signatory of the “Campaign for the gradual abolition of the death penalty” petition in 2013, which led to her being arrested again a year later and sentenced to ten years in detention. On several occasions, she said she had been mishandled and assaulted by prison guards. His multiple and long stays in detention caused him neurological problems, causing muscular paralysis.
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