Activist won for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to jailed Iranian women’s rights advocate, Narges Mohammadi, for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran.
Ms Mohammadi, one of the country’s leading human rights activists, has been arrested 13 times, convicted five times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes.
Authorities last arrested her in November and she is currently serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years.
Charges include spreading propaganda against the state.
She contributed an opinion piece for The New York Times from behind bars in which she wrote: “What the government may not understand is that the more of us they lock up, the stronger we become.”
Ms Mohammadi was jailed for taking part in the recent nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after she she was detained by the country’s morality police.
That sparked one of the most-intense challenges ever to Iran’s theocracy since its 1979 Islamic Revolution. More than 500 people were killed in a heavy security crackdown while over 22,000 others were arrested.
There was no immediate reaction from Iranian state television and other state-controlled media. Some semiofficial news agencies acknowledged Ms Mohammadi ’s win in online messages, citing foreign press reports.
The UN Human Rights Office said her award “highlights the courage and determination of Iranian women”.
She is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, a non-governmental organisation led by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Ms Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the 122-year-old prize and the first one since Maria Ressa of the Philippines won the award in 2021 jointly with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov.
Hailing Ms Mohammadi as a “freedom fighter”, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee started her speech by saying, in Farsi, the words for “woman, life, freedom” – one of the slogans of protests against the Iranian government.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” Ms Berit Reiss-Andersen said.
The award also recognised the hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated against Iranian discrimination and oppression of women, she said.
In 2018, Ms Mohammadi, an engineer, was awarded the 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prize.
Last year the prize was won by human rights activists from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, in what was seen as a strong rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart and ally.
Past winners include the late Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev, former US president Barack Obama, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and the UN.
Unlike the other Nobel categories, which are selected and announced in Stockholm, founder Alfred Nobel decreed that the peace prize be decided and awarded in Oslo by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee.
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This is a developing story.
Source: The National
