Narges MOHAMMADI

Image Credit: VOA/WikkiCommons

Writer, journalist, human rights defender, and Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi was assaulted and detained in December 2025, almost a year after her 2024 release on medical grounds. Throughout the year, Mohammadi continued to face lengthy prison time for multiple unjust sentences, totalling 35 years’ imprisonment and 154 lashes, as well as two years of internal exile, a travel ban and various restrictions on her social and political activism, imposed as reprisals for her human rights activism across over 14 years (see Case Lists 2012, 2017 and 2019-2025).    

On 12 December 2025, Mohammadi was violently detained in Mashhad city while attending a memorial service for Iranian human rights lawyer Khosrow Alikordi, found dead in suspicious circumstances earlier that month. Mohammadi called her family on 14 December, sounding unwell and informing them that she had been hospitalised twice due to injuries sustained from plain-clothed agents who hit her with batons on the head and neck and threatened to kill her. Mohammadi suffers from severe ill-health, including a neurological disorder that can result in seizures, temporary partial paralysis, and a pulmonary embolism for which she has been denied essential medication.  

Mohammadi, born on 21 April 1972, is an Honorary Member of the Danish, Belgian, Norwegian and Swedish PEN centres. Her book, White Torture (Oneworld, 2022), documents the use of solitary confinement against women prisoners in Iran. She is the former Vice-President and spokesperson of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC), co-winner of the 2013 Oxfam Novib/PEN Award, winner of the 2011 Per Anger Prize and the 2009 Alexander Langer Award. In December 2022, Mohammadi was awarded the RSF Prize for Courage for her tireless fight for press freedom and human rights. In 2023, she was awarded the  PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Prize, UNESCO’s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize and in October 2023, she was awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Update 

In February 2026, after an unfair trial, Mohammadi was transferred to a prison in Zanjan province after receiving additional sentences for national security charges, totalling seven-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, two years of internal exile and a two-year travel ban.