THE Nargis Mohammadi, which was honored today with the award Peace Nobel, dedicated her life to the human rights defender in Iran, at the cost of years in prison and a heartbreaking separation from her family.

She fights against the mandatory headscarf and the death penalty, denounces sexual violence in prisons and tirelessly continues her fight, even behind the bars of Tehran’s Evin prison, where the authorities locked her up again more than a year ago. time.

The 51-year-old fighter “is the most determined person I know,” her husband Taghi Tahmani, a refugee in France since 2012 with their twin children, now 17, told AFP.

Nargis Mohammadi has been arrested repeatedly since 1998. He has been sentenced to prison terms and will soon be tried on new charges. According to Reporters Without Borders, he is the victim of “genuine judicial harassment”.

The awarding of this woman with the Nobel Peace Prize is very symbolic, as the “Woman Life Freedom” movement has been rocking Iran for more than a year. The controversy, which was sparked by the death of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, Mahsha Amini, who died after being arrested by the morality police for not wearing the headscarf properly, has been drowned in blood. But for Mohammadi, the change is “irreversible”.

“The movement accelerated the process of democracy, freedom and equality,” he had recently answered written questions from AFP, and “weakened the foundations of despotic religious rule.”

“Voice of the Voiceless”

Premonition or coincidence? Two months before the protests began on September 16, 2022, Nargis Mohammadi had published on her Instagram account, which is managed by her family, a text against the obligation of women to wear the hijab.

“In this authoritarian regime, women’s voice is forbidden, women’s hair is forbidden (…) I, Nargis Mohammadi, (…) declare that I will not accept the compulsory hijab”, she wrote in this text. Two months later, videos showing women burning their hijabs in Iran went viral.

Born in 1972 in Zanjan, northwestern Iran, Nargis Mohammadi studied physics before becoming an engineer. He also engaged in journalism in reformist newspapers.

In the 2000s, he joined the Center for Defenders of Human Rights (of which he is currently vice-president), which was founded by the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2003. At that time, she fought mainly for the abolition of the death penalty.

“Nargis was allowed to leave the country, but he always refused to do so (…) became the voice of the voiceless. Even in prison, she does not forget her duties and informs about the condition of the prisoners,” says Reza Moini, an Iranian human rights activist based in Paris who knows her well.

In a book entitled “White torture”, she denounces the conditions of detention of imprisoned women, especially their confinement in solitary confinement, abuses of which she herself was a victim. She is currently being held in the women’s wing, along with around 50 other inmates, according to her husband.

“indescribable pain”

“She has three battles in her life: respect for human rights, her feminist commitment and justice for all the crimes that have been committed,” Rahmani insists.

Nargis Mohammadi he was imprisoned from May 2015 to October 2020 for “forming and running an illegal group” calling for the abolition of the death penalty.

He has since been sentenced again to whipping and years in prison for “propaganda against the system”, “sedition” or even “insulting national security”.

The stylish, curly-haired woman, who is considered a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, has not been able to see her children Kiana and Ali, who have been seeing their mother since 2015, grow up.

“It is an unbearable and indescribable pain,” she said in September in her answers to AFP.

Check out this Instagram post.

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“In 24 years of marriage, we had 5 or 6 years of life together!”, reckons her husband.

But she “never quit, they can’t bend her. They have tried, but so far they have failed, all they have succeeded in doing is strengthening her resolve,” he says. “Nargis is also a woman who is very alive, very optimistic,” he still underlines.

Her award, will further strengthen her struggle and the movement she leads, moreover, her husband told Reuters on Friday. for the ‘woman, life, freedom’ movement”, said Taghi Tahmani, in an interview at his home in Paris.

“This award is for all the people of Iran, for human rights activists,” he added.

“Nargis and people like her have chosen this kind of life, and if they are supported, it will strengthen their motivation to pursue their goals.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides who will be awarded, invited Iran to release Mohammadione of the country’s leading activists fighting for women’s rights and the abolition of the death penalty.

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