JAILED IRANIAN WOMEN’S RIGHTS CAMPAIGNER NARGES MOHAMMADI WINS 2023 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Fri 06 October 2023:

Narges Mohammadi, a jailed Iranian women’s rights advocate, has won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the awarding body.

Hailing Mohammadi as a “freedom fighter”, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee started her speech by saying, in Farsi, the words for “woman, life, freedom” – one of the slogans of the peaceful protests against the Iranian government.

When protests for equality for women broke out in Iran last year, “from prison she expressed support for the demonstrators,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the committee.

Mohammadi is “a woman, a human rights advocate and a freedom fighter,” she said.

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The award “also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated against the Iranian regime.”

Mohammadi was honoured “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

“Freedom. [Mohammadi] fights for freedom of expression and the right to independence and against rules requiring women to remain out of sight and cover up their bodies,” Reiss-Andersen said.

“The freedom demands expressed by demonstrators apply not only to women but to the entire population.”

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Who is Narges Mohammadi?

Narges Mohammadi, 51, currently jailed in the Evin prison in Tehran, is an Iranian writer, human rights activist and deputy director of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC).

Mohammadi is currently serving multiple sentences, amounting to 12 years, most recently for “spreading anti-state propaganda”, and was given 154 lashes as a result of the decision.

But Mohammadi has been in and out of prison for the last decade due to her activism and work on abolishing the death penalty in Iran and campaigning for women’s rights.

In 2022, she was only tried for five minutes before being given a sentence of eight years and 70 lashes.

Following the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, Mohammadi has continued to report her experience of abuse as a woman in Evin prison.

Mohammadi becomes the 19th woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Narges Mohammadi is the second Iranian woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after human rights activist Shirin Ebadi won the award in 2003.

Mohammadi was behind bars for the recent nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after she she was detained by the country’s morality police. That sparked one of the most-intense challenges ever to Iran’s theocracy since its 1979 Islamic Revolution. More than 500 people were killed in a heavy security crackdown while over 22,000 others were arrested.

However, Mohammadi contributed an opinion piece for The New York Times from behind bars.

“What the government may not understand is that the more of us they lock up, the stronger we become,” she wrote.

Who has won a Nobel this week?

On Monday, Hungarian-born Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman of the US won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their research that led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19, made by Pfizer and Moderna.

It was then was the turn of Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier who on Tuesday won the prize in physics for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

On Wednesday, scientists Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov were awarded the prize in chemistry “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”, which illuminate computer monitors and television screens and can be used by doctors to map tumours.

On Thursday Norwegian author Jon Fosse won the prize in literature for his “innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”.

Alfred Nobel and his coveted peace prize

Nobel was a 19th-century businessman and chemist from Sweden who made his fortune after inventing dynamite – a key product for the burgeoning industrial transformation of the time.

Towards the end of his life, he decided to use his vast savings to fund annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. The first Nobel Prizes were presented in 1901, five years after his death.

According to Nobel, the Peace Prize will be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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