NASRIN SOTOUDEH

 NASRIN SOTOUDEH

Nasrin Sotoudeh was born in 1963 in a "religious, middle-class" Iranian family.

Nasrin Sotoudeh is an exemplary Iranian woman and lawyer who for years has been struggling to restore women’s rights. She has represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections as well as prisoners sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors. She has also represented women arrested for appearing in public without a hijab, which is a punishable offence in Iran.

As a direct result of her human rights work defending protesters who had been arrested during the 2009 demonstrations against the contested re-election of ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Nasrin Sotoudeh was previously imprisoned in Iran from 2010 until 2013. At this time she was charged with “acting against national security” and “propaganda against the regime” and sentenced to 11 years in prison and an additional bar on her practising law and leaving the country for 20 years. This sentence was later reduced to six years in prison and a 10-year bar on her practising law. During this time she was regularly held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison, her family visits and phone calls were restricted and denied and her family and friends were repeatedly harassed, including her daughter being placed under a travel ban. Following extensive international condemnation of the case and just days before an address by then Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to the United Nations, the woman human rights defender was released on 18 September 2013, after serving 3 years of her sentence.

Between 2013 and 2018, Nasrin Sotoudeh continued her work as a human rights defender. On 13 June 2018 she was arrested and charged with eight offences, including "propaganda against the state", "assembly and collusion" and “espionage”. These charges were based on her legal representation of opposition activists, young prisoners who were sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors and women’s rights activists, including women prosecuted for removing their mandatory headscarf. She was sentenced in two different trials to 38 years and 6 months in prison and 148 lashes. One of the charges against her was “membership in an illegal group”, referring to her membership of Legam, a campaign to abolish the death penalty in Iran. According to Article 134 of the Islamic Penal Code, only the most severe punishment should be enforced.

In August 2020, Nasrin launched a 46-day hunger strike in Evin Prison that brought global attention to poor health conditions in Iranian prisons. She was punished for her protest by being transferred, despite a serious heart condition, to an overcrowded windowless cell in the notoriously unsanitary Qarchak Women’s Prison. Even inside prison, she demonstrates inspiring clarity of purpose. As she strives to promote human rights and human values, Nasrin Sotoudeh inspires others to follow in her footsteps.

Since her arrest, Nasrin Sotoudeh, her family and friends have come under increasing pressure from the Iranian authorities.

Nasrin Sotouteh is the recipient of numerous human rights awards, including the prestigious European Parliament’s Sahkarov Prize for Freedom of Thought (2012).

2020 she is co-recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, 'Alternative Nobel Prize'. The prize, which is awarded by the Right Livelihood Foundation based in Stockholm, celebrates those 'offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today'.

2020 The American Bar Association awarded Nasrin Sotoudeh with the Eleanor Roosevelt Prize for global human rights advancement, for her “stalwart courage and effectiveness in pursuit of a just rule of law in Iran.”

In 2021, she was named as of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World.

From her jail cell, the human rights defender has also been awarded the Human Rights Award by the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, and bestowed with an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University in Canada.

Sotoudeh life’s work is also featured in a new documentary narrated by Academy Award Winner Olivia Colmman, and filmed mostly secretly in Tehran. Documentary movie NASRIN filmed in Iran by women and men who risked arrest to make this film. NASRIN  is an immersive portrait of one of the world’s most courageous human rights activists and political prisoners, Nasrin Sotoudeh, and of Iran’s remarkably resilient women’s rights movement.

https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/profile/nasrin-sotoudeh