"Your courage in denouncing abuses and injustices is an example for the entire planet, you have to know that you are not alone, this is your home," the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, assured the women of Iran at the award ceremony. Sakharov to the freedom of conscience that the institution grants every year and that in the current edition has been granted, posthumously, to the young Jina Mahsa Amini, detained, tortured and died in police custody in September 2022 for not wearing "correctly "the Islamic veil, and the protest movement that inspired her murder, 'Women, life and freedom', Afsoon Najafi and Mersedeh Shahinkar.
Metsola had words of encouragement for the Iranian women and for all the people who have demonstrated, the relatives of the deceased and the missing: "Your courage will win because yours is a just cause." The fact that the ayatollah regime has not allowed Mahsa Amini's relatives to travel to collect the award "is another example of the treatment that the Iranian people face every day," denounced Metsola, who presented the award to family lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht. Like other Sakharov laureates, Jina Mahsa Amini paid for her bravery with her life. "Jina was 22 years old. She was a daughter, a sister, a student, a young woman with dreams and ambitions for a better life," recalled the president of the European Parliament before a silent chamber.
On September 13, 2022, she was arrested for not wearing the hijab in accordance with the strict Islamic rules that apply to women's clothing in Iran. Tortured in police custody, the young woman, of Kurdish origin, died three days later. "But her voice was raised globally by women, men, students, academics, people of all backgrounds, from the streets of Iran. That was the beginning of the 'Women, Life, Freedom' movement, values that we cannot taken for granted," Metsola warned on behalf of the European Parliament, which for 35 years has distinguished freedom fighters with the name of the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov.
"The uprising that has taken place in Iran since the day Mahsa Amini was arrested has been a women's uprising, in which women have been the protagonists. It was the women who took to the streets, accompanied by men, with the results that they have been able to see," emphasized Mahsa Amini's lawyer, before reading to the MEPs some words written by the young woman's mother. "They took her life unjustly, they believed that by ending her they would prevent what had to happen from happening, just as those who burned Joan of Arc thought that her dreams would go up in smoke, but that was not the case. They did not know and they still do not know that, from the ashes of Jina and Juana, an invincible spirit will be born like a phoenix" and "the promise of the defense of human values contained in the motto of the movement 'Woman, Life, Freedom'", the lawyer read with emotion Iranian, the only representative of the young woman whom Tehran has allowed to travel.
One of the women who demonstrated in protest of the death of Mahsa Amini was Mersedeh Shahinkar, a fitness instructor who on October 15, 2022 lost an eye as a result of shooting by the Iranian police, present today in Strasbourg. More than 500 protesters suffered similar injuries, according to different records, and there are also "thousands missing," Shahinkar recalled in a brief press appearance before the ceremony. "We, the people of Iran, have been prisoners in our own country for 44 years. They kill us and, nevertheless, we harbor the seed of hope. We have the right to live like other countries in the world," emphasized the woman, whose two-tone look is reminiscent of the price paid for their activism immediately. She currently lives, along with her 11-year-old daughter, in Germany, from where she continues her fight.
The activist Afsoon Najafi has also traveled to Strasbourg, whose sister died as a victim of the police repression with which the Iranian regime reacted to the protests for gender equality and freedom. "More than 90,000 people who protested have been released but there are still many deprived of liberty and subjected to torture." Although they are closely monitoring the situation, there are thousands of people they know nothing about and the regime is repressing their families and anyone who tries to help them," Afsoon Najafi denounced to the international press. "The time has come for the European political representatives stop reaching out" to those responsible for this repression.
