The jailed activist’s Nobel is also a reminder of Iran’s momentous protest movement.
Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian women’s rights and anti-death penalty advocate currently incarcerated in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons, has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mohammadi’s win comes after a year of protest in the country following the murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being detained for improperly wearing her headscarf. Though Mohammadi was behind bars during these protests and couldn’t participate directly, she has worked as an advocate for related causes for decades, and continues to document human rights abuses within prison.
Mohammadi’s win, though a significant symbolic and political move on the part of the Nobel committee, is unlikely to change Iran’s stance on the protests or its human rights violations. Nor is it likely to free Mohammadi or materially change her condition, though the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen said in her speech announcing the prize that she hoped the Iranian authorities would release Mohammadi so she could attend the awards ceremony in December, the Associated Press reported.
The award is both an explicit recognition of Mohammadi’s decades of work, as well as the ongoing struggle of women in Iran.
“This year’s Peace Prize also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who, in the preceding year, have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women,” the committee wrote in a press release Friday. Iranian women who spoke with the Associated Press, like 22-year-old chemistry student Arezou Mohebi, echoed that statement, calling the prize “an award for all Iranian girls and women” and Mohammadi herself “the bravest I have ever seen.”
Mohammadi has been fighting for human rights for decades
Mohammadi, an engineer by training, has long been an active and important part of the Iranian struggle for human rights, working in particular on behalf of women and incarcerated people and against the death penalty. In 2003, she began working with the now-banned group Defenders of Human Rights Center, founded by Iran’s other Nobel Peace Prize winner, lawyer Shirin Ebadi.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, a historian of the modern Middle East at the University of Pennsylvania, told Vox that within Iran, Mohammadi “is very highly respected and admired for her unflinching commitment to freedom, women’s rights, and human rights, as well as for her personal sacrifices in realizing these ideals. People in Iran are rejoicing over this prize.”
Mohammadi was first arrested in 2011 for her work advocating for incarcerated human rights activists and their families; while out on bail in 2015, she was again arrested and imprisoned for her campaigning against Iran’s use of the death penalty.
