Exclusive: the human rights lawyer, temporarily released from jail on medical grounds, describes her love for her family, and why she keeps going despite brutal treatment at the hands of the regime
Iran’s Qarchak jail has been called many things: a torture chamber; the worst women’s prison in the world; unfit for humans. Nasrin Sotoudeh uses just one word to describe the nine months she spent there: “Hell.”
Sotoudeh does not speak of the appalling conditions or stench of sewage, the undrinkable water or lack of food, the disease or cruelty of solitary confinement. She simply says: “I am ready to return whenever they say.”
The lawyer and human rights advocate was three years into her sentence of 38 years, alongside 148 lashes, when it was paused on medical grounds after she was diagnosed with a heart condition in 2021.
Her temporary release means she is living at home in Tehran with her husband, Reza Khandan, and son, Nima, 16, but it has not freed her from constant government harassment. The authorities have been relentless in their efforts to silence her, bringing three new cases against her; sentencing her to a further eight years in prison; banning her from practising law and using social media; sentencing her husband to five years; freezing her bank assets; and prohibiting her daughter, Mehraveh Khandan, from leaving the country. The restriction on Khandan, 24, who is now studying art in the Netherlands, has been the only liberty infringement Sotoudeh has successfully fought.
“My family and I have faced constant legal sabotage that the judiciary system brings up against us,” says Sotoudeh, who turns 61 this month.
But it is the regime’s murderous determination to crush all dissent that pains her the most. The deaths of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, and other young women, including 16-year-old Armita Geravand, who was attacked by hijab-enforcing police on the metro, “have been the hardest thing to endure”.
Her medical leave has coincided with the government intensifying its war on women. Mass protests sparked by Amini’s death have been met with violent repression by the authorities leading to hundreds more deaths and thousands of arrests. In the past month video footage of women being forcefully bundled off the streets by the “morality police” emerged as the government ratchets up its efforts to enforce the hijab with a new campaign, named Noor (meaning light); and rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death for his support of the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
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