Iran: Narges Mohammadi released on medical grounds

Iranian Narges Mohammadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and incarcerated in Tehran since November 2021, was temporarily released from prison on Wednesday for medical reasons, according to her lawyer.

Aged 52, the activist has been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned for 25 years for her commitment against compulsory veiling for women and against the death penalty. She spent much of the last decade in prison.

“According to the opinion of the forensic doctor, the Tehran prosecutor’s office suspended the execution of Narges Mohammadi’s sentence for three weeks,” said his lawyer, Me Mostafa Nili, specifying that the activist “was released from prison”. “The reason for his release is his physical condition after the removal of a tumor and a bone graft carried out 21 days ago,” added Me Nili on the social network X, blocked in Iran.

The temporary release of Narges Mohammadi, Nobel Peace laureate in 2023, is “insufficient”, her support committee reacted from Paris. “After a decade of imprisonment, Narges needs specialized medical care in a safe environment,” the Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement.

Narges Mohammadi is serving a sentence in the women’s section of Evin prison in northern Tehran, with around fifty prisoners, according to her husband Taghi Rahmani. Considered a “detainee of opinion” by Amnesty International, this elegant woman with curly black hair has barely been able to see her children, Kiana and Ali, grow up, who have not seen her since 2015 and live in France.

Imprisoned, she was unable to receive the Nobel which had been awarded to her for her fight against the death penalty. In June, the Iranian activist was sentenced to another year in prison for “propaganda against the state.” She had refused to attend the hearing of her trial after unsuccessfully requesting that it be open to the public.

At the beginning of November, she supported an Iranian student arrested after undressing in public in front of a university in Tehran. The student “transformed her body into a symbol of dissidence,” said Ms. Mohammadi, demanding “her release and an end to the harassment of women” in Iran.

In March, the activist broadcast an audio message from prison in which she denounced a “large-scale war against women” in the Islamic Republic. She also fights behind bars against sexual violence in detention.

In Iran, women have been required to follow a strict dress code, including covering their hair in public places, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Born in 1972 in Zanjan, in the northwest of Iran, Narges Mohammadi studied physics before becoming an engineer. At the same time, she launched into journalism with reform media.

In the 2000s, Ms. Mohammadi joined the Center for Human Rights Defenders (of which she is still vice-president), founded by Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003.

Narges Mohammadi had already been imprisoned between May 2015 and October 2020 for having “formed and led an illegal group”, calling for the abolition of capital punishment in Iran.