OSLO: Imprisoned Iranian 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.

“We hope to send the message to women all around the world that are living in conditions where they are systematically discriminated: ‘Have the courage, keep on going’,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said.

“We want to give the prize to encourage Narges Mohammadi and the hundreds of thousands of people who have been crying for exactly ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in Iran,” she added, referring to the protest movement’s main slogan.

Iran denounced the “biased and political” action by the Nobel committee. “We note that the Nobel Peace Committee awarded the Peace Prize to a person who was convicted of repeated violations of laws and criminal acts,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said in a statement. “We condemn this biased and political move.”

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. “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women,” the newspaper quoted her as saying in a statement, which it said was issued after the Nobel announcement.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the award was “a tribute to all those women who are fighting for their rights at the risk of their freedom, their health and even their lives.”

The United States hailed the courage of the imprisoned Iranian activist, as Abram Paley, the acting US envoy on Iran, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Narges Mohammadi is a hero to so many in Iran and around the world. Today, the entire world stands united in recognising her courage.”

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 Centre, a non-governmental organisation led by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who lives in exile.

“I congratulate Narges Mohammadi and all Iranian women for this prize,” Ebadi said. “This prize will shed light on violation of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic ... which unfortunately has proven that it cannot be reformed.”

Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the 122-year-old prize and the first one since Maria Ressa of the Philippines garnered the award in 2021 jointly with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov.

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 ‘woman, life and freedom’ movement,” he said.

The Nobel Committee’s honouring of Mohammadi also came just over a year after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iranian morality police for allegedly flouting the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.

That provoked months of nationwide protests that posed the biggest challenge to clerical rule in years, and was met with a deadly security crackdown costing several hundred lives.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2023