PARIS:
Iranian prison authorities have blocked 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi from being taken to hospital for emergency care because of her refusal to wear the mandatory hijab, her family said.
Veteran rights activist Mohammadi, 51, who is currently being held in Tehran’s Evin prison, was awarded the prize in October “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran”.
Her selection came in the wake of months-long protests across Iran sparked by the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women.
Mohammadi then announced that she would under no circumstances wear a hijab, the head covering that has been compulsory for women in public since shortly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Prison authorities in response refused to transfer Mohammadi, who suffers from heart and lung conditions, to a hospital outside Evin, her family said in a statement, warning that her health and life were at risk.
“For two days and nights, a group of women in Evin protested in the prison yard to send Narges Mohammadi to the heart hospital,” they wrote on her official Instagram account late Wednesday.
“The prison warden announced that according to the orders of the higher authorities, it was forbidden to send her to the heart hospital without a headscarf and her transfer was cancelled,” the family said.
Also read: Imprisoned Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi wins Nobel Peace Prize
On Monday, a medical team came to Evin’s women’s ward to examine Mohammadi and perform an echocardiogram after “the prison refused to even take Narges to the clinic” without a headscarf, the statement added.
He said the scan showed two severely blocked veins and high pulmonary pressure, and a coronary angiogram and lung scan were urgently needed.
“She is willing to risk her life by not wearing the ‘forced hijab’, even for medical treatment,” the family said.
In a message expressing gratitude for the award, read by her daughter and posted on the Nobel website late Tuesday, Mohammadi described the compulsory hijab as “a means of control and repression imposed on society and in which the continuation and survival of this authoritarian religious regime It depends”.
Earlier this week, Mohammadi also expressed outrage over what he described as the “murder” of 17-year-old Armita Garawand.
Activists say Garawad died after being beaten by Tehran’s morality police for not wearing a headscarf, which authorities have accused.
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