This year's Nobel Peace Prize is a direct message against the repression of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The prestigious award goes to Iranian journalist and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, as announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee yesterday from Oslo. For more than a decade, Mohammadi has been in and out of prison unjustly because of his activism. He is currently serving multiple sentences in Evin prison, in Tehran.
The committee awarded Mohammadi "for the fight against the oppression of women in Iran and the fight to promote human rights and freedom for all", said the president, Berit Reiss-Andersen.
With the award, the Norwegian jury also wanted to "recognize the hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated against the policies of discrimination and oppression of the theocratic regime against women". With this intention, the president of the committee began the speech, who pronounced the words "zan, zendegi, azadi" ("woman, life, freedom", in Persian). It was the rallying cry of the mass protests that erupted in the country after the death of Mahsà Jinà Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022.
Mohammadi's “brave fight,” continued Reiss-Andersen, “has had enormous personal costs. The Iranian regime arrested her 13 times and sentenced her five times to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. Mohammadi is still in prison." Among the crimes he is accused of is spreading propaganda against the Iranian government. From prison, Mohammadi conducted several interviews with other inmates about prison conditions, which she included in the book Tortura blanca, the publication of which added more years to the final sentence of ten years and eight months in prison.
The committee went a step further when it urged Tehran, which has condemned the award, to release Mohammadi: "If the Iranian authorities make the right decision, they will release him so that he can be present to receive this honor (in December), which it is what we expect", said the president. The Iranian government-affiliated Fars news agency criticized the "West" for awarding the activist "for actions against Iran's national security".
Born in Zanjan, 300 kilometers from Tehran, in April 1972, Mohammadi studied physics and engineering, but already at a young age she created a group where social and political matters were discussed. Activism came to him from a family in which some of the members had gone through prison. During her student days, she met her husband, Taghi Rahmani, and they were close for 14 years, which pushed her even further into activism. "This Nobel Prize will encourage Narges' fight for human rights, but the most important thing is that it is, in fact, a prize for the Women, Life and Freedom movement," assured Rahmani, in an interview broadcast by Reuters at his home in Paris, where he went into exile after being released from prison, while his wife stayed to continue the fight for human rights.
Mohammadi, mother of two twins who are approaching their twenties, worked in the nineties for several reformist publications, including the only magazine that advocated for women's rights. She was also deputy director of the Center for Defenders of Human Rights in Iran, a non-governmental organization directed by the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, Xirin Ebadi. Mohammadi was one of three imprisoned Iranian journalists to receive Unesco's World Press Freedom Prize in early 2023.
From the United Nations they pointed out that the recognition of the Nobel serves to highlight "the courage and determination against the reprisals, intimidation, violence and arrests suffered by Iranian women", and that they are "an inspiration to the world" , in the words of the spokeswoman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Elizabeth Throssell.
While this year's election serves as a denunciation of the oppression of the ayatollahs' regime, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was read as a warning to Vladimir Putin and his allies. The award was then shared by Alés Bialiatski, a human rights defender whom Belarus has sentenced in 2023 to ten years in prison; the Russian human rights organization Memorial, illegal in their country, and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine.
