Iran's imprisoned women's rights advocate Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday in a rebuke to Tehran's theocratic leaders and boost for anti-government protesters.
The award-making committee said the prize honoured those behind recent unprecedented demonstrations in Iran and called for the release of Mohammadi, 51, who has campaigned for three decades for women's rights and abolition of the death penalty.
"We hope to send the message to women all around the world that are living in conditions where they are systematically discriminated: 'have the courage, keep on going'," Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told Reuters.
"We want to give the prize to encourage Narges Mohammadi and the hundreds of thousands of people who have been crying for exactly 'Woman, Life, Freedom' in Iran," she added, referring to the protest movement's main slogan.
There was no immediate official reaction from Tehran, which calls the protests Western-led subversion. But semi-official news agency Fars said Mohammadi had "received her prize from the Westerners" after making headlines "due to her acts against the national security."
Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Tehran's Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years imprisonment, according to the Front Line Defenders rights organisation.
Charges include spreading propaganda against the state.
She is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, a non-governmental organisation led by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Mohammadi is the 19th woman to win the 122-year-old prize and the first one since Maria Ressa of the Philippines won the award in 2021 jointly with Russia's Dmitry Muratov.
"This Nobel Prize will embolden Narges' fight for human rights, but more importantly, this is in fact a prize for the 'women, life and freedom' movement," Mohammadi's husband Taghi Rahmani told Reuters at his home in Paris, applauding as he watched the announcement on TV.
Mohammadi was quoted by the New York Times as saying she would never stop striving for democracy and equality, even if that meant staying in prison.
"I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women," the newspaper quoted her as saying in a statement.
Arrested more than a dozen times in her life, and held three times in Evin prison since 2012, Mohammadi has been unable to see her husband for 15 years and her children for seven.
Her prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or around $1 million, will be presented in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.
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