Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, a 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has started a hunger strike in Tehran prison to protest the lack of medical care for prisoners and the requirement for women to wear the veil, his family said on Monday.
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“Narges Mohammadi informed her family that she had started a hunger strike a few hours ago. We are concerned about his health,” his relatives said in a statement.
Ms Mohammadi, 51, has been repeatedly arrested and convicted and has been imprisoned in Evin Prison in the Iranian capital since 2021.
On Thursday, her family had already announced that the activist, whose health was fragile, was being refused transfer to the hospital by the prison authorities because she did not want to cover her head.
According to an electrocardiogram taken by a prison doctor, she needs to be urgently hospitalized, the family says.
“The Islamic Republic is responsible for anything that may happen to our beloved Narges,” the statement said.
The Nobel Committee, in turn, said in a statement that it was “deeply concerned” about Ms. Mohammadi’s health.
“The requirement that prisoners wear a headscarf in hospital is inhumane and morally unacceptable,” committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said, calling on Iranian authorities to provide medical assistance to all prisoners who need it.
Free expression organization Pen International said it was “extremely concerned” for Ms Mohammadi and said Iranian authorities were “responsible for putting her life in danger”.
An anti-death penalty and women’s rights activist, Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Prize in October for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”
She is one of the main faces of the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran.
The movement, in which women took off veils, cut their hair and demonstrated in the streets, was sparked by the death last year of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after she was arrested in Tehran for failing to comply with strict Islamic law Dress code. The protest was heavily suppressed.