The Nobel Peace Prize was crowned on Friday by Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, currently imprisoned in the Islamic Republic where bareheaded women blow a wind of emancipation despite repression.
The 51-year-old activist and journalist is being rewarded “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her struggle to promote human rights and freedom for all,” said the president of the Norwegian Nobel committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen , in Oslo.
Vice-president of the Center for Human Rights Defenders founded by Shirin Ebadi, also a Nobel Prize winner in 2003, Narges Mohammadi has been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned for 25 years for her commitment against compulsory veiling for women, and the death sentence.
She was rewarded as Iran was hit last year by a vast protest movement triggered by the death of a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, Mahsa Amini, after her arrest in Tehran for non-compliance with the strict dress code. Islamic.
“The movement accelerated the process of democracy, freedom and equality”, now “irreversible”, Narges Mohammadi wrote to AFP last month from his cell.
She and three fellow inmates burned their veils in the courtyard of Tehran’s Evin Prison to mark the anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death on September 16.
Iran is at 143e place — out of 146 countries — in the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranking on gender equality.
The “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising — a slogan with which Ms. Reiss-Andersen began her announcement on Friday — was violently repressed there: 551 demonstrators, including 68 children and 49 women, were killed by security forces, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), and thousands of others arrested.
“No prospect of freedom”
If the protest is now more diffuse, it continues in different forms, posing to the Iranian authorities one of the greatest challenges since the 1979 revolution.
Scenes still unimaginable a year ago, women today go out revealed in public places despite the risks.
In September, the predominantly conservative Iranian Parliament toughened sanctions targeting women who refuse the veil.
“This year’s Peace Prize also recognizes the hundreds of thousands of people who, over the past year, have demonstrated against theocratic regimes’ policies of discrimination and oppression against women,” said Mme Reiss-Andersen.
Arrested again in 2021, Narges Mohammadi has not seen her children – who live in France with her husband – for eight years.
Considered a “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, she said in her correspondence with the AFP that she had “almost no prospect of freedom”.
Mme Reiss-Andersen said Friday he “hopes” for his release by Iranian authorities.
20 years ago, the Nobel had already been awarded to an Iranian woman, the lawyer Shirin Ebadi, rewarded “for her efforts in favor of democracy and human rights”, and more particularly those of women and children. in his country.
In 2003, Mme Ebadi defied Iranian conservatives by receiving his Nobel Prize in Oslo without wearing a hijab.
If she remains behind bars, Narges Mohammadi will not be able to travel to the Norwegian capital to receive her Nobel — a diploma and gold medal worth 11 million crowns (nearly $1.41 million) — on the 10 December.
The Peace Prize has repeatedly rewarded imprisoned activists, including the Belarusian Ales Bialiatski last year, represented by his wife at the Nobel ceremony, and the Chinese Liu Xiaobo whose chair remained symbolically empty in 2010.