Shirin Ebadi
I’ve always admired people who cut through to the very conscience of something and stand firm. Shirin Ebadi is this sort of fearless woman who tells her unflinching story in the book Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran. “Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death, but I have learned to overcome my fear,” said Shirin Ebadi in 1999.
Shirin Ebadi was born in Iran in 1947 and grew up in Tehran. She loves her country fiercely, and just as fiercely hates its human rights atrocities. Standing up for what is right regardless of the cost, she defends the persecuted, at risk to her own life, often without accepting any payment for services. Her cleverness as she navigates rocky waters with the political leadership of Iran, and somehow remains alive, is stunningly admirable.
It’s thanks to her father that Ebadi grew up believing that a woman could become anything she set her mind to be. He didn’t put limits on her, so she didn’t limit herself either. Following in her father’s footsteps, Ebadi became a lawyer and the first female judge in Iran in 1970. There were many who believed that a woman shouldn’t be a judge, but it was a time of expanding freedoms for women. In 1979, everything changed. The Iranian Revolution ousted the monarchy and replaced it with an anti-Western authoritarian theocracy firmly rooted in strict Sharia law under the Ayatollah Khomeini.
The change in leadership meant that Shirin Ebadi was demoted from judge to clerk simply because she was a woman.
During the decade of war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Shirin raised her daughters. After the war, she began to practice family law and fight for human rights in homage to her Persian heritage. In 2002, she founded the Center for Defenders of Human Rights in Iran, an organization not officially recognized by the government, which has actively defended the rights of Iranian women, political prisoners and minorities over the past eighteen years.
In her book Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran, Ebadi wrote:
“We had been ruled by autocrats, kings, and now clerics; our history reached back thousands of years, all the way to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who inscribed civilization’s first human rights charter on a clay cylinder. I viewed myself as an inheritor of this history, of the great tradition of epic Persian poetry that I had read to my girls every night before bedtime. Like most Iranians, I was bitterly disappointed in Iran’s present precisely because of the love and admiration I had for its past,” (p. 9).
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Shirin was bugged, followed and harassed by the Iranian political regime as they monitored her human rights efforts. Her approach? Let them bug me. She wanted the regime to hear what she was doing. She had nothing to hide. She lived in hope that by hearing truth, seeds would be planted that could lead to improved human rights one day.
In 1999, Ebadi was imprisoned for 25 days in solitary confinement for “disturbing public opinion.” International pressure ultimately reduced her sentence to a fine.
Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, which lead to increased international attention along with increased surveillance by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Pressured not to talk to the media about Iran’s human rights violations, she did not cave in.
“I had been a judge and was now a lawyer, and the law concerns itself with intent and the results of intent. If the state intended the best for its citizens, then it needed to demonstrate that in its behavior toward them. It could not arrest journalists, throw them into prison, inflict all manner of psychological torture and abuse on them, and then dispatch an agent to talk to me about America ‘exploiting’ my objections to this.” (pp. 56-57)
In 2009, while Ebadi was in Spain for a conference, the Iranian government confiscated her properties including her office, and didn’t allow her to return to the country. Further, they framed her husband in a sex scandal.
As she told Porochista Khakpour in an interview for The Guardian in 2017:
“The reason I told the story so openly was that I wanted to show what the government in Iran is capable of. They have done what they did to my husband to many others. But more so, the talk of this in Iran is taboo, and I wanted to break the taboo. A government who can whip me on the streets if strands of hair are revealed, and hires a sex worker for politics in the name of Islam?”
Living in exile in London since 2009, Ebadi continues to fight for human rights in the homeland she loves. Ebadi is a member of PeaceJam, an organization of Nobel Peace Prize winners who seek to foster young leaders in an effort to promote positive change in the world.
SOURCES
Ebadi, Shirin. Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran. Random House: 2016.
Ebadi, Shirin. Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country. Random House: 2006.
“Profile: Shirin Ebadi.” BBC News. November 27, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3181992.stm
“Iranian Lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi: The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran Is the Most Important Obstacle to Women’s Rights.” Center for Human Rights in Iran. March 7, 2019. https://www.iranhumanrights.org/2019/03/iranian-lawyer-and-nobel-peace-prize-laureate-shirin-ebadi-the-constitution-of-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-is-the-most-important-obstacle-to-womens-rights/
Khakpour, Porochista. “Shirin Ebadi: ‘Almost a fourth of the people on Earth are Muslim. Are they like each other? Of course not.’” The Guardian. April 25, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/apr/25/shirin-ebadi-outside-of-iran-i-knew-id-be-more-useful-i-could-speak
“Shirin Ebadi: 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Winner.” Peace Jam. http://www.peacejam.org/shirin-ebadi