Who is Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi?

NEW DELHI: Iranian women's rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi was on Friday awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2023.

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



Here's all you need to know about the Iranian activist:

• One of Iran's leading human rights activists, Mohammadi has campaigned for women's rights and the abolition of the death penalty.
• 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, working for newspapers that were at the time part of the reformist movement.
• Mohammadi is currently serving multiple sentences in Tehran's Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years imprisonment, according to the Front Line Defenders rights organisation, one of the many periods she has been detained behind bars.
• She 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.
• In the 2000s, she joined the Center for Human Rights Defenders, founded by the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, fighting in particular for the abolition of the death penalty.
• Mohammadi 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.
• 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.
• She 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.
• Amnesty International describes her as a prisoner of conscience who has been arbitrarily detained.
• Mohammadi told AFP in September she was currently serving a combined sentence of 10 years and nine months in prison, had also been sentenced to 154 lashes and had five cases against her linked to her activities in jail alone.
• Mohammadi has missed much of the childhood of her twin children, Kiana and Ali, as well as the pain of being apart from her husband Rahmani. "In 24 years of marriage, we had just five or six years of living together!" he said.