Nobel Peace PrizeNarges Mohammadi, Jailed Iranian Activist, Is 2023 Laureate

Ales Bialiatski

A longtime pillar of the human rights movement in Belarus, Ales Bialiatski, now 61, shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year while awaiting trial.

He had been arrested in 2021, as part of a long crackdown on the protests that followed the autocrat Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s declaration of victory in a 2020 presidential election, which many Western governments consider fraudulent. In March, Mr. Bialiatski was given a 10-year prison sentence.

He had already spent almost three years in prison between 2011 and 2014 on what rights groups called politically motivated charges.

Liu Xiaobo

When Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s more well-known dissidents, received the award in 2010, he was in prison for his advocacy of democracy and human rights. He kept vigil in Tiananmen Square in an attempt to protect democracy protesters in 1989, and in 2008 he had promoted a charter that called for a fundamental shake-up of China’s authoritarian system.

A written statement he had prepared for his 2009 trial for inciting subversion served, in his absence, as his Nobel lecture. “There is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom, and China will in the end become a nation ruled by law, where human rights reign supreme,” Mr. Liu wrote.

Mr. Liu died in 2017, at age 61, at a hospital in northeastern China. Although he had officially been granted medical parole, he remained in state custody, under guard, until the end.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, now 78, rose to prominence in the 1980s as a key leader in Myanmar’s struggle for democracy against its ruling military junta, and was placed under house arrest in 1989. She was still being held in 1991, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee honored “her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”

She remained in custody for much of the next two decades. Released in 2010, she was finally able to give her Nobel lecture two years later, and became Myanmar’s top civilian leader in 2015. But her time in power tarnished her reputation, as she defended the country’s generals, including against accusations the military had conducted genocide against the Rohingya minority.

That stance did not protect her against a 2021 coup d’état, after which she was again imprisoned, with multiple decades-long sentences.

Carl von Ossietzky

Carl von Ossietzky, the 1935 laureate, was a prominent pacifist journalist whose writings had sharply criticized the Nazi party during its rise to power. He also exposed secret German rearmament in violation of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles, for which he spent seven months in prison.

He was arrested again in 1933, when the Nazis consolidated their power in the wake of the Reichstag fire, and spent years in various concentration camps.

He died in 1938 at age 48 from the effects of his ill treatment in the camps, still under heavy government surveillance.

“I couldn’t shout in class, but I was so happy,” added Ali, who has been separated from his mother since 2015 and last spoke to her over a year ago. She is serving a 10-year jail sentence in Tehran’s Evin Prison for “spreading anti-state propaganda.”

The family’s small apartment was abuzz with activity as visitors and reporters squeezed in and out, and as Mr. Rahmani fielded dozens of telephone interviews in Persian with news outlets from all over the world, mint tea in hand and sharing chocolates.

“We want the voice of the Iranian people to be amplified from the inside,” Mr. Rahmani said through an interpreter, sitting on a blue couch not far from a framed picture of him and his wife that sat on a bookshelf.

He said he and his children had not yet spoken with Ms. Mohammadi about her Nobel news, because they cannot call the prison where she is held.

“We are afraid for my mom every day,” Ali added. “The Nobel Prize is a sign for her to continue straight on, to not abandon the fight.”

Ali described his mother as “extremely kind” and extremely determined, “someone who will always speak the truth, even with a gun to her head.”

He said his mother wanted to stay in Iran and continue her rights advocacy. But the activism has come at a cost, with the family fearing for her safety every day, and living in a separate country from her.

“This is part of the system of invisible torture of Iran,” Ali said, “how they want to break people.”

Many Iranians came to see Ms. Amini’s death as emblematic of the heavy-handed and repressive nature of the Islamic Republic, particularly for women. Their anger and their aspirations were reflected in a chant that came to be emblematic of the protest movement: “Woman, life, freedom.”

The protests spread quickly, with women burning their head scarves and holding marches in cities across the country to call for an end to rule by the clerical establishment. In response, security forces attacked and beat protesters, using batons and tear gas and firing metal pellets and rubber bullets.

Hundreds were killed in the government crackdown, including at least 44 minors, while around 20,000 Iranians were arrested, the United Nations calculated. Although the protests continued for months, they were slowly snuffed out.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in October last year that he was “heartbroken” over Ms. Amini’s death, but he denounced the protests as “rioting” and accused the United States and Israel of conspiring to foment the unrest.

“They have a big problem with an Iran that is strong and independent,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

Even from captivity in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, Ms. Mohammadi sought to continue her activism and participate in the uprising. She organized protests alongside fellow prisoners and delivered speeches in the prison yard.

“When prison drags on for many years, you have to give your life meaning within confinement and keep love alive,” she has told The New York Times. “I have to keep my eyes on the horizon and the future even though the prison walls are tall and near and blocking my view.”

“I hope that in five years or 10 years, we will see a very different situation,” he said.

More than 100 individuals have received the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception in 1901, which has also been awarded to organizations. The first woman to receive it was Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian writer who was a leading figure in a nascent pacifist movement in Europe. She was recognized in 1905, two years after Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, in physics.

It would be 26 years before another woman was selected for the award: the American Jane Addams, regarded as the founder of modern social work and an advocate for the concerns of children and mothers. She shared the 1931 prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, who was the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Other women to receive the honor include the Philippine journalist Maria Ressa, who was named in 2021; Mother Teresa in 1979; the legal reformer Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003; the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004; and, in 2014, the education activist Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the award.

In 2011, three women shared the award: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist from Liberia; and Tawakkol Karman, a journalist from Yemen who became the face of the “Arab Spring” uprising in her country.

Here are the other female laureates:

1946 — Emily Greene Balch, American economist, sociologist, pacifist and educator

1976 — Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, founders of a peace movement in Northern Ireland

1982 — Alva Myrdal, Swedish diplomat and disarmament advocate

1991 — Aung San Suu Kyi, pro-democracy activist in Myanmar

1992 — Rigoberta Menchú Tum, leading advocate for Mayan rights and culture

1997 — Jody Williams, American disarmament activist who campaigned to abolish land mines

2018 — Nadia Murad, Yazidi activist from northern Iraq who escaped enslavement by the Islamic State and led a campaign against the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war

“Standing alongside the brave mothers of Iran,” she added, “I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women.”

Her family, from whom she has been separated during her time in prison, said in a statement: “Although the years of her absence can never be compensated for us, the reality is that the honor of recognizing Narges’s efforts for peace is a source of solace for our indescribable suffering.”

“For us, who know that the Nobel Peace Prize will aid her in achieving her goals, this day is a blessed day,” the family added.

Ms. Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, a fellow activist who lives in exile in Paris with the couple’s children, echoed the Nobel committee in saying that her selection as this year’s laureate also recognized the hundreds of thousands of people who have demonstrated in favor of women’s rights in Iran over the past year.

The protests were prompted by the death in police custody in September last year of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman arrested by the country’s morality police after officers accused her of wearing her state-mandated religious veil too loosely.

“Awarding the valuable Nobel Peace Prize to Narges Mohammadi in a year when the innocent blood of Mahsa Amini and hundreds of young girls and boys has been shed is, in fact, a recognition of this important prize to the Mahsa movement and subsequently the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement,” Mr. Rahmani said in a statement. “This prize is not just for Narges; it is for all the people of Iran.”

Her current imprisonment is hardly her first encounter with Iran’s harsh approach to dissent.

Over the past 30 years, Iran’s government has penalized her over and over for her activism and her writing, depriving her of most of what she holds dear — her career as an engineer, her health, time with her parents, husband and children, and her liberty.

The last time Ms. Mohammadi heard the voices of her 16-year-old twins, Ali and Kiana, was over a year ago. The last time she held her son and daughter in her arms was eight years ago. Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, 63, also a writer and prominent activist who was jailed for 14 years in Iran, lives in exile in France with the twins.

The suffering and loss she has endured have not dimmed her determination to keep pushing for change.

A small window in her cell in the women’s ward of Evin opens to a view of the mountains surrounding the prison in north Tehran. Spring brought more rain this year, and the rolling hills were covered with wildflowers.

“I sit in front of the window every day, stare at the greenery and dream of a free Iran,” Ms. Mohammadi said in a rare and unauthorized telephone interview from inside Evin in April. “The more they punish me, the more they take away from me, the more determined I become to fight until we achieve democracy and freedom and nothing less.”