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Mohammadi has been campaigning for women’s rights since she was a student. That was when she was arrested for the first time. Since then she has spent many years in prison. Even now she is in prison – and continues to work from there.
Narges Mohammadi radiated great inner calm when she contacted us in a video message last April, on her 50th birthday of all days: “I am full of hope and confidence today as I return to prison – encouraged because people and organizations like you support me,” she says. “I’m returning to prison to continue the fight.”
Once again she has to serve a prison sentence and once again she is threatened with solitary confinement. The accusations always sound similar: “propaganda against the system” or “gathering against national security.”
Mohammadi has now spent a large part of her life in prison – since 2016 as vice president of the human rights organization Defender of Human Rights Center, which was founded by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. Her focus: the often arbitrary penal and judicial system of the Islamic Republic, which she herself has experienced so often.
Months of isolation
“When I was first put in a solitary cell 20 years ago, there was no opportunity to get some fresh air. I just sat in my cell every day,” says Mohammadi. There was also no possibility to shower. “That’s up to the interrogator to decide.” How often you can go to the toilet also depended on him.
“They open the door three times a day. When the officer says so, they open it five times. I emphasize: everything, absolutely everything, that they do is on the orders of an interrogator.”
The solitary confinement, which she has been fighting non-violently for years, is painful, she says in letters from prison. You lose track of time. Without any stimulation the mind is vulnerable. And yet Mohammadi doesn’t lose hope, as she says in April 2022: “Four months ago I was… Evin Prison locked in solitary confinement for more than two months during my last incarceration.”
“Courage, Perseverance and attention”
When she was moved to the isolation cell for the fourth time, she asked herself whether she should be disappointed – “because our campaign failed.” But, says Mohammadi: “On the contrary: I am convinced that the realization of human rights and democracy requires courage, perseverance and attention.”
Mohammadi has been back in prison for a year and a half now and continues her work from there. Among other things by their report in the BBC It became known that the women imprisoned as a result of the wave of protests were exposed to massive sexual violence and torture.
Mohammadi was already campaigning for women’s rights as a physics student and was arrested for the first time. She later worked as a journalist for reform-oriented newspapers and as an author of political essays. In 2003 she joined the Defender of Human Rights Center.
Her husband Taghi Rahmani also worked as a critical journalist. He left Iran in 2012 and now lives in France. Rahmani said in an interview that his wife was convinced that she could be more useful if she stayed in Iran.
“Of course we are oppressed by the Islamic Republic of Iran,” says Mohammadi. “But we believe that the protest movement is a sign of the strength and resilience of the population – and of the weakness of the oppressors.”