Nobel Peace Prize recognizes Iranian women’s fight for gender equity
Eugene Chudnovsky
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Iranian physicist Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”
This is the second Nobel Peace Prize awarded to an Iranian woman. In 2003 it was awarded to human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi. In the 20 years that followed, she was harassed by security agents and received numerous death threats. Her law credentials have been revoked, and her Nobel medal has been confiscated.
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Mohammadi is a vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, which is headed by Ebadi. Mohammadi became involved in promoting women’s rights in the 1990s during her student years at the Imam Khomeini International University in Qazvin, where she graduated with a degree in applied physics. She subsequently worked for the Iran Engineering Inspection Corporation and, concurrently, as a journalist writing about gender equity and the abolition of the death penalty. She was first arrested and spent a year in prison in 1998. In 2011 she was sentenced to 11 years for “acting against national security, membership in the DHRC, and propaganda against the regime.” International protests led to her release in 2012.
In the years that followed, Mohammadi was in and out of jail, sentenced to lashes in addition to prison terms. In 2018 the American Physical Society awarded her the Andrei Sakharov Human Rights Prize. The following year she held a hunger strike together with seven other females in Evin prison to commemorate the lives of hundreds of protesters killed on the streets of Iran by the Revolutionary Guard. In a letter from prison, she described how male guards dragged her through broken glass while she bled from the cuts.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammadi comes at a time of yearlong protests in the streets of Iran and on university campuses triggered by the September 2022 death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman arrested for not wearing a hijab. Many students have been killed or abducted during the protests. A common injury among female protesters, inflicted by the police to force women into submission, was losing an eye. Hundreds of students spent months in detention and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from several months to 18 years. Thousands were asked to report to disciplinary committees at their universities, and hundreds have been expelled. Positions of faculty members who sided with the students have been terminated.
In a report published by the BBC in December 2022, Mohammadi protested the crackdown from Evin prison, which received many female demonstrators. She described how one activist had her hands and legs tied to a hook above her head and then was sexually assaulted by security officers. In 2023, Mohammadi gave another report on the conditions of women in Evin prison, which included the names of 58 prisoners and the details of their interrogation and torture.
Responding to the news about her Nobel Peace Prize, Mohammadi said, “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny, and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women.” It will inspire many in Iran, but the United States should not stay out of that fight. It must pursue human rights and gender equity in all negotiations with Iran.
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Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York and co-chairman of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.