OSLO: Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi will begin a new hunger strike from her prison cell in Iran as the prize is awarded in Oslo on Sunday, her family said Saturday.
Mohammadi, who has campaigned against the compulsory wearing of the hijab and the death penalty in Iran, will go on hunger strike “in solidarity” with the Baha’i religious minority, her brother and husband told a press conference in the Norwegian capital on the eve of the Nobel award ceremony.
“She is not here with us today, she is in prison and she will be on a hunger strike in solidarity with a religious minority but we feel her presence here,” her younger brother, Hamidreza Mohammadi, said in a brief opening statement.
The 51-year-old activist’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, went on to explain that the strike was a gesture of solidarity with the Baha’i religious minority, two of whose leading figures are also on hunger strike.
“She said that ‘I will start my hunger strike on the day that I am being granted this prize, perhaps then the world will hear more about it’,” he explained.
Iran’s largest religious minority, the Baha’i community is the target of discrimination in many areas of society, according to its representatives.
Mohammadi already went on a hunger strike for several days at the beginning of November to obtain the right to be transferred to hospital without covering her head.
She was awarded the Nobel prize in October “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran”.
Arrested 13 times, sentenced five times to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes, and imprisoned again since 2021, Mohammadi has spent much of the past two decades in and out of jail and has not seen her children, now based in France, for eight years.
Narges Mohammadi is one of the women spearheading the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, which included months-long protests across Iran triggered by the September 2022 death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested for allegedly flouting the Islamic republic’s strict dress rules for women.