Iran’s imprisoned women’s rights advocate Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a rebuke to Tehran’s theocratic leaders and boost for anti-government protesters.
The award-making committee said the prize honoured those behind recent unprecedented demonstrations in Iran and called for the release of Mohammadi, 51, who has campaigned for three decades for women’s rights and abolition of the death penalty.
There was no immediate official reaction from Tehran, which calls the protests Western-led subversion.
But semi-official news agency Fars said Mohammadi had “received her prize from the Westerners” after making headlines “due to her acts against the national security.”
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Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years imprisonment, one of the many periods she has been detained behind bars, according to the Front Line Defenders rights organisation.
Charges include spreading propaganda against the state.
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.
Mohammadi’s husband Taghi Rahmani applauded as he watched the announcement on TV at his home in Paris. “This Nobel Prize will embolden Narges’ fight for human rights, but more importantly, this is in fact a prize for the ‘women, life and freedom’ movement,” he told Reuters.
Arrested more than a dozen times in her life, and held three times in Evin prison since 2012, Mohammadi has been unable to see her husband for 15 years and her children for seven.
Her prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or around $1 million, will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.
Past winners range from Martin Luther King to Nelson Mandela.
Mohammadi was quoted by the New York Times as saying she would never stop striving for democracy and equality, even if that meant staying in prison.
Editor Oloyede Oworu
