Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi reveals permanent travel ban preventing her from seeing children abroad amid ongoing human rights activism.
PARIS: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi announced she has been permanently barred from leaving Iran.
The Iranian human rights activist revealed the travel ban in a birthday message to her teenage twins, whom she hasn’t seen for over a decade.
Mohammadi, 53, was released from prison in December last year after serving more than three years, though only on temporary medical leave.
Her legal team warned she could be re-arrested and returned to jail at any moment.
“I applied for a passport so I could come to you,” she told her children Kiana and Ali Rahmani on their 19th birthday.
“The Islamic republic has issued and enforced two types of travel bans, including a ‘permanent travel ban’,” she confirmed.
Her twins live in Paris with their father Taghi Rahmani, another prominent Iranian activist who has faced multiple imprisonments.
Mohammadi received the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her twenty-year human rights campaign in Iran.
She strongly supported the 2022-2023 protests following Mahsa Amini’s death in custody.
The authorities “stamp the word ‘permanent’ on our documents, while they themselves live each day in fear of the fall that will inevitably come at the hands of the people of Iran,” she stated.
It remains unclear when and under what circumstances the travel bans were imposed.
Her children accepted the Nobel prize on her behalf in Oslo during 2023.
Mohammadi hasn’t seen her twins for eleven years.
She was last arrested in November 2021 and has spent much of the past decade imprisoned.
Despite being outside jail, Mohammadi continues her defiance by refusing to wear the mandatory headscarf during international video conferences.
She regularly predicts the downfall of Iran’s clerical system that has governed since the 1979 revolution. – AFP
