Imprisoned Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of her tireless campaigning for women’s rights and democracy, and against the death penalty.
Mohammadi, 51, has kept up her activism despite numerous arrests by Iranian authorities and spending years behind bars. She has remained a leading light for nationwide, women-led protests, sparked by the death last year of a 22-year-old woman in police custody. Those demonstrations grew into one of the most intense challenges ever to Iran’s theocratic government.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, began Friday’s announcement with the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” in Farsi — the slogan of the demonstrations in Iran.
“This prize is first and foremost a recognition of the very important work of a whole movement in Iran with its undisputed leader, Narges Mohammadi,” Reiss-Andersen said. She also urged Iran to release Mohammadi in time for the prize ceremony on Dec. 10.
For nearly all of Mohammadi’s life, Iran has been governed by a Shiite theocracy headed by the country’s supreme leader. While women hold jobs, academic positions and even government appointments, their lives are tightly controlled. Laws require all women to at least wear a headscarf, or hijab, to cover their hair as a sign of piety. Iran and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only countries that mandate that.
In a statement released after the Nobel announcement, Mohammadi said she will “never stop striving for the realization of democracy, freedom and equality.”
“Surely, the Nobel Peace Prize will make me more resilient, determined, hopeful and enthusiastic on this path, and it will accelerate my pace,” she said in the statement, prepared in advance in case she was named the Nobel laureate.
Mohammadi, an engineer by training, has been imprisoned 13 times and convicted five. In total, she has been sentenced to 31 years in prison. Her most recent incarceration began when she was detained in 2021 after attending a memorial for a person killed in nationwide protests sparked by an increase in gasoline prices.
She has been held at Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, whose inmates include those with Western ties and political prisoners.
Amnesty International called for Mohammadi’s immediate release.
“Her recognition today by the Nobel Peace committee sends a clear message to the Iranian authorities that their crackdown on peaceful critics and human rights defenders will not go unchallenged,” Amnesty Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.
Mohammadi’s brother, Hamidreza Mohammadi, told The Associated Press from Norway where he lives that he has not been able to speak with his sister but knows the prize “means a lot to her.”
“The prize means that the world has seen this movement,” but it will not affect the situation in Iran, he said. “The regime will double down on the opposition. … They will just crush people.”
Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, who lives in exile in Paris with their two children, 16-year-old twins, said his wife “has a sentence she always repeats: ‘Every single award will make me more intrepid, more resilient and more brave for realizing human rights, freedom, civil equality and democracy.’”
Rahmani hasn’t been able to see his wife for 11 years, and their children haven΄t seen their mother for seven, he said.
