Join on WhatsApp
Join on Telegram
Rabat – The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on September 6 to Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who is currently in jail in the Islamic Republic, the Nobel Prize published on its official X account.
The 51-year-old journalist and activist was recognized “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her struggle for the promotion of human rights and freedom for all,” according to Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in Oslo.
The award committee praised Mohammadi’s devotion to upholding human rights in Iran, even at the cost of family separation and lengthy incarceration.
Mohammadi has continued to pursue human rights from behind the bars of Tehran’s Evin prison, where she was reincarcerated more than a year ago. She has spoken out against the death penalty, compulsory veiling, and sexual abuse of detainees.
The Iranian activist “is the most determined person I know,” her husband Taghi Rahmani, who has been a refugee in France since 2012, told AFP.
Arrested several times since 1998, Mohammadi received multiple prison sentences throughout her life and is due to stand trial shortly on new charges.
For Reporters Without Borders (RSF), she is the victim of “veritable judicial harassment.”
The award comes at a time when the women’s rights movement has been shaking Iran for over a year.
Last year, protests erupted following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was imprisoned by the morality police for wearing an “unsuitable” veil and died while in custody.
“The movement has accelerated the process of democracy, freedom, and equality,” Mohammadi recently told AFP, saying that it has “weakened the foundations of the despotic religious government.”
In a book entitled “White Torture,” she denounces the treatment of female convicts, especially when they are in solitary confinement, citing abuses that she says she herself has suffered.
According to her husband, she is currently being kept in the women’s wing of the prison among about 50 other inmates.
Read also: Trio Awarded 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Attosecond Pulse Breakthroughs
