Iranian Nobel laureate badly beaten in prison, her lawyer and family say

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was violently beaten by prison guards last week, and her requests for hospital care and a meeting with her lawyer have been denied, her lawyer said Thursday.

The lawyer, Mostafa Nili, told Iranian news media about the violence against Mohammadi, raising concerns about the state of her health and well-being. He said that her cellmates had communicated her situation.

"My client says that she was beaten and has bruises on her body," Nili was quoted as saying in the reformist-leaning Emtedad news outlet. "Despite the prison doctor's orders, and considering my client's heart condition," he said, "she has not been sent to the hospital."

Nili said that for the past nine months, prison authorities had denied Mohammadi the right to make phone calls and to have visits with her family and lawyer.

Mohammadi, 52, Iran's most prominent human rights and women's rights activist, is serving a 10-year sentence in the notorious Evin prison on charges of threatening national security because of her human rights advocacy. She was awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.

From the women's ward of the prison, she has organized workshops, talks, protests and sit-ins against the government's human rights violations.

On Aug. 6, Mohammadi and other female prisoners staged a protest and chanted slogans against the planned execution of a Kurdish man, Reza Rasaei, 34, who was arrested during protests in 2022 and accused of having a role in the killing of a member of Iran's security forces. He denied the allegations, and rights group said he had been convicted in "a sham trial."

Mohammadi's Instagram page also posted audio from an earlier protest that she and other prisoners had staged against the death penalty. The women can be heard chanting, "Neither threats, nor repression, nor executions have any effect any more," and "Death to the dictator."

Their gathering on August 6 turned violent, Mohammadi's husband, Taghi Rahmani, and Nili said, when agents from the Intelligence Ministry who were stationed at the prison tried to quell their chanting and then antiriot prison guards raided their protest in the prison yard. The women were violently beaten, pushed and shoved into their cells and locked inside, her husband said.

Ten of the women collapsed, with five of them, including Mohammadi, suffering injuries, according to Rahmani. The guards beat Mohammadi, dealing blows to her chest and causing breathing problems so severe that her cellmates thought she had gone into cardiac arrest, her husband said. The women were treated at the prison's clinic, where the doctor ordered that she be taken to a hospital, Rahmani and Nili said.

Rahmani said in an interview from Paris, where he lives in exile with the couple's 17-year-old twin son and daughter, that his wife had sent a message about what happened through her cellmates, who were allowed to call and visit with their families.

"I am very scared for her, watching all of this from the outside, and knowing the kind of physical and emotional stress Narges is under is terrifying for us," Rahmani said. "Narges now has a high profile internationally, and they are deliberately punishing her."

A few days after the episode, Iran's prison organization issued a report denying that guards had physically beaten female prisoners. The statement, published by the judiciary's news outlet, Mizan, blamed Mohammadi for "instigating women prisoners" to attack a prison guard and attempting to break the lock on the door leading to the yard.

The statement claimed that the women had been guided peacefully back to their cells without any violence.

Last week, over the course of two days, Iran executed 29 prisoners who had primarily been convicted on drug-trafficking and murder charges, according to the United Nations and rights groups. Rasaei was among them.

The United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said in a statement last week that "this represents an alarmingly high number of executions in such a short period of time." He said his agency had verified that 38 people were executed in July, bringing the total number of executions to at least 345 this year, among them 15 women.

Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent organization based in New York, said that Iran's government had long used executions and the death penalty as tools of intimidation, including during the 2022 women-led uprising -- which was set off by the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the morality police, after she was arrested for supposedly violating the country's hijab laws.

Ghaemi said that the recent wave of executions could be a message from the government that any internal unrest at such a sensitive time would be met with an iron fist. And that, he said, extends to Mohammadi.

Iran is facing internal turmoil after the election of a new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist who nevertheless announced that his Cabinet would include several conservatives and only one woman. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the country's vice president for strategy, resigned soon after.

There is also heightened tensions in the region as the possibility of war with Israel looms: Iran's leaders have pledged to retaliate against Israel for the assassination of Hamas' political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, the capital of Iran.