Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel peace prize laureate, has described the 'torture' of solitary confinement and systematic medical neglect in an exclusive extract of writing smuggled from prison in Iran. Her health has suffered severely during confinement, with the activist now said to be in a critical condition.
Memoir Reveals Disturbing Treatment
The writing from the past decade will be part of a soon-to-be-published memoir that offers a rare and alarming insight into the treatment of Mohammadi. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care, and long stretches in solitary confinement during her numerous imprisonments. 'There is no hardship worse than illness combined with imprisonment,' she wrote. 'Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner's rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail.'
Health Crisis and 'Slow Execution'
After those words were written and she was rearrested, Mohammadi’s health hit another crisis point this year, with her weight dropping by more than 20kg. She was found unconscious in her cell after an apparent heart attack in March. For weeks, requests by her family and doctors for proper medical treatment from her team of surgeons were denied. On Sunday, she was released on bail to receive treatment in Tehran but remains in critical condition. Her family have said her continuing detention and refusal of proper medical care constitute a 'slow execution'.
Smuggling the Manuscript
The writings were smuggled out by fellow prisoners and visitors during Mohammadi’s time in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak, and Zanjan prisons, at considerable risk to their own safety. They had to be rewritten several times over the past decade after pages or notebooks were discovered and destroyed by prison guards.
About the Memoir
The memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, will be published in September. It covers Mohammadi’s early life, how her parents inspired her political convictions, her path into activism, and the many years she spent in prison for public protest. Mohammadi has been arrested 14 times for her activism on advancing women’s rights in Iran, improving prisoner conditions, and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty. She has been sentenced to 44 years in prison and 154 lashes across several convictions. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel peace prize while in prison in 2023 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests. In December 2024, she was released on a temporary sentence suspension after a series of health events, but was violently rearrested a year later and sentenced to years more prison time in February.
