The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi began a hunger strike this Sunday, coinciding with the award ceremony in Oslo, to show solidarity with the persecution suffered by the Baha’i religious minority in Iran, where they are imprisoned, she announced this Saturday his family.
The announcement came on Saturday during the traditional press conference at the Nobel Institute on the eve of the Peace Prize ceremony, which Mohammadi will receive this year for her fight in defense of the rights of Iranian women.
As explained by her husband, Taghi Rahmani, during the appearance, in which her children Ali and Kiana, all exiled in France, were also present, the decision is due to the lack of religious freedom in this Asian country. “Discrimination has been institutionalized in Iran, the regime is a theocracy, it is the clergy who govern us,” Rahmani highlighted.
The Baha’i religion, considered a heresy by Muslims, was founded in the 19th century by an Iranian Shiite cleric, and is currently professed by nearly six million people in more than 200 countries, according to data from the community itself. Some 300,000 Baha’is currently live in Iran, denouncing religious persecution, imprisonment and executions by the regime, an accusation that the authorities deny.
Mohammadi, 51, had already gone on a three-day hunger strike last month to protest the lack of medical care in prison and the mandatory wearing of the Islamic headscarf, after she was refused to go to a hospital for treatment. a review because she refused to wear a hijab.
The Iranian activist is serving a ten-year prison sentence in Tehran’s Evin Prison for “spreading propaganda against the state” and has been in and out of Iranian prisons for years. Her activism has cost her 13 arrests, five sentences of 31 years in prison in total and 154 lashes.
Given the Iranian regime’s refusal to release Mohammadi, his father and his children went to Oslo City Hall to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in his place.
