Nasrin Sotoudeh, Free Nasrin Sotoudeh

Nasrin Sotoudeh is an Iranian human rights lawyer, who has defended activists including women prosecuted for protesting the mandatory hijab law. In March 2019, Nasrin was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes.

Credit: Behrouz Mehri/AFP

On International Human Rights Day we want to highlight the work Nasrin has done to ensure human rights are upheld in Iran and the injustice of her imprisonment. You can sign the petition demanding Nasrin’s release here. 

The Guardian reported that; Mohammad Moqiseh, a judge at a revolutionary court in Tehran, said that Sotoudeh had been sentenced to five years for assembling against national security and two years for insulting the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Whilst Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, wrote on Facebook that the sentence was decades in jail and 148 lashes, unusually harsh even for Iran, which cracks down hard on dissent and regularly imposes death sentences for some crimes.

The Council of Bars and Law Societies Of Europe (CCBE) has granted its 2019 Human Rights Award to Nasrin and three other Iranian lawyers currently in prison. Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi received the CCBE award on behalf of Sotoudeh, Soltani, Najafi, and Davudi in a ceremony in Brussels on the 29th November.

Nasrin was born in 1963, and went on to study International Law at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. In 1995 she took the bar and began representing journalists such as Kourosh Zaim, Isa Saharkhiz, Heshmat Tabarzadi, Nahid Keshavarz, and Roya Tolouie, as well as child abuse and criminal cases. She worked closely with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and her Defenders of Human Rights Center. Following Sotoudeh's first arrest in 2013, Ebadi called for her release and expressed concern regarding her health. In the statement, Ebadi said, 

"Ms. Sotoudeh is one of the last remaining courageous human rights lawyers who has accepted all risks for defending the victims of human rights violations in Iran".

A movement against the compulsory hijab erupted in Iran in 2017 when one woman staged a solo act of resistance. She removed her headscarf and silently waved it on the end of a stick.

Nasrin has had her own freedom taken from her for defending other’s human rights. Sign the petition at Amnesty International and join us in calling for her immediate release.