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Iranian campaigner Narges Mohammadi has for decades campaigned on the most sensitive issues in the Islamic republic, opposing pillars of the clerical system including capital punishment and the obligatory hijab, and defiantly refusing to give up her campaigning even behind bars.
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She has not seen her children for eight years, has spent most of her recent life in prison and acknowledges there is no immediate prospect of release.
Yet still she insists her struggle is worthwhile, saying the protest movement that erupted one year ago in Iran against the Islamic republic is still alive.
First arrested 22 years ago, Mohammadi, 51, has spent much of the past two decades in and out of jail over her unstinting campaigning for human rights in Iran. She has most recently been incarcerated since November 2021.
The activist “is the most determined person I know”, her husband Taghi Rahmani, who has been a refugee in France since 2012 with their two children, twins now aged 17, told AFP.
“She has three causes in her life — respect for human rights, her feminist commitment and justice for all the crimes that have been committed,” said Rahmani.
While she could only witness from behind bars the protests that broke out following the death on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini — who had been arrested for violating Iran’s strict dress rules for women — she says the movement made clear the levels of dissatisfaction in society.
“The government was not able to break the protests of the people of Iran,” she told AFP in September in written answers from Tehran’s Evin prison where she is held, describing the protest wave as “irreversible.”
‘Voice of the voiceless’
Born in 1972 in Zanjan, in the northwest of Iran, Mohammadi studied physics before becoming an engineer. But she then launched a new career in journalism,…
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