One evening in London the Iranian satirist Hadi Khorsandi performed a skit called The Trial of Shirin Ebadi’s Sister. Khorsandi (father of the comedian Shappi Khorsandi) played a choleric Iranian judge who is told that the sister of the country’s most troublesome human rights lawyer is being brought to court. When an agitated woman arrives — actually a nurse sent to take his blood pressure — he jumps to the wrong conclusion. Each time she tries to explain he shouts: “Be quiet or I’ll execute you!” The “trial” only halts when the judge goes off to answer the call to prayer, telling the woman her execution will take place after lunch.
Ebadi was in the audience and couldn’t help laughing, despite herself. This absurd but all too truthful take on Iran’s legal system was inspired by what she says was one of the worst days of her life — when her sister really was arrested and imprisoned — and that’s saying something, given how many sad and terrible days are packed into the pages of Until We Are Free.
Those who recall Ebadi’s autobiography, Iran Awakening, or have followed her campaign against human rights abuses, will know she was a young judge who lost her job when the Islamic Revolution swept Iran in 1979. As her friends fled abroad she chose to stay and oppose the new regime.
In 2003 she was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for seeking justice for girls such as Leila, an 11-year-old who was out picking wild flowers when she was raped by three men, who then threw her over a cliff. One of the men hanged himself in prison. The other two were convicted but because the life of a man, even a murderer, was valued more highly than a child, Leila’s family was expected to pay for the executions. They could not raise the money, so the men were released.
A year later, Ebadi, 68, published a report on the execution of children in Iran, highlighting the horrifying case of a 16-year-old girl who was condemned to death for premarital sex and hanged from a crane. When Ebadi went home that night there was a death threat pinned to her door. This episode opens Until We Are Free and presages an escalation of harassment that has reshaped her life.
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The election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 turned Iran into “one of the world’s largest prisons for journalists, lawyers, women’s rights activists and students,” Ebadi says. Interwoven with stories from her case files is the story of what happened to her family. Her secretaries were arrested, her phones tapped, her files confiscated and her work disrupted by hours of questioning by a secret policeman she knew as Mahmudi about her finances and links to activists and governments in the West.
That she could withstand: it was when Mahmudi began targeting her family that everything fell apart. Ebadi’s daughter was detained and her sister was jailed.
The saddest thread in this powerful and sometimes shocking book, though, is the slow unravelling of her relationship with her husband, Javad. His frustration at Ebadi’s obsession with work and his loneliness when she was forced into exile proved a fatal weakness, exploited by the secret police. He was set up with a woman, then arrested and threatened with execution for adultery. After being beaten and held in solitary confinement, he recorded a statement denouncing Ebadi and her work. Ebadi’s anger and his own humiliation at his betrayal were impossible to surmount: they agreed to separate. A woman who is an emblem of her country now “lives in airports” flitting between the European Commission and the UN in Geneva, and running a London-based centre for human rights.
Will she ever be able to return? Last weekend’s elections brought a landslide for the moderates in Tehran. Change may be coming at last, but Ebadi — and everyone around her — has paid a high price.
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