Tag: women

The world must call on Iran to release Zeynab Jalalian

Imagine that you criticise the government and are arrested for it. You end up in prison not for a day, a month, or even a year. You are in prison for 18 years, and you do not know if you will ever be released. You are deemed too dangerous because you are not broken, and you are not famous enough to garner the public attention that would force the regime to let you go.

In 1982, the same year that I was arrested in Iran, a girl was born in a small village in West Azerbaijan Province. Her family called her Zeynab, and she became a women’s rights activist. In 2008, aged 27, while visiting a girls’ high school to talk about International Women’s Day, she was arrested. She was subsequently tortured and sentenced to execution for “enmity against God”.

Zeynab Jalalian and I belong to two different generations of Iranian women who fight against misogynistic laws. I did not reveal the names and addresses of friends who criticised the regime. So I was tortured severely and sentenced to death. My father’s unrelenting fight was what changed my fate.

Zeynab’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2011. During her imprisonment, she has not been given any leave and has only been permitted a small number of visits from her family.

Writing to her mother a few years ago, Zeynab depicted the torture she was forced to endure:

My pen is unable to describe my pain and distress. They blindfolded me, tore off my clothes, chained me to an iron bed and lashed my feet with a cable. My feet became black and swollen under torture. Eventually, I felt nothing. My entire body became numb. Under torture, I held my beliefs and my hope for women who are struggling for a better future. How can I witness the execution of my friends and say nothing? They are asking me to confess to wrongdoing in order to receive medical treatment. How can I regret struggling against them?

Many prisoners died behind bars because they did not receive medical treatment. When my stomach bled, I was told that they would take me to hospital if I signed a letter of repentance. This is a different kind of execution.

Despite her life sentence, she is denied any peace in her cell, and her health has deteriorated due to the torture inflicted on her.

Zeynab was permitted fibroid embolisation surgery after Redress Trust, a global organisation that supports survivors of torture, wrote an open letter in September 2025. However, she was not even allowed to recover in hospital and was sent back to prison the following day.

Her health is still of extreme concern, as she has asthma, pterygium, kidney disease, digestive problems, and she is currently at risk of losing her eyesight as a result of injuries from torture.

Since the US-Israel war on Iran

The war on Iran has made conditions worse for prisoners. While bombs were killing people and flattening essential infrastructure, prisoners have not received enough food and care due to a lack of personnel.

Furthermore, activists who have had nothing to do with the war, and who were imprisoned years before the attacks started, have been executed for the crime of being Israeli or American spies. In reality, the regime has always weaponised the accusation of activists serving as informants for Western countries in order to repress and silence them.

Indeed, the war on Iran has only made the regime stronger than ever before. This leaves many of us asking what this will mean for those who have been trying to topple it for the past 47 years.

This war has been waged against the people of Iran and its prisoners.

The negotiations between the US and the Islamic Republic demonstrated where all the interests lie: oil and resources, not the innocent lives and well-being of Iranian citizens. American forces are certainly not pressing the demands that Iran’s prisoners should be released and that the death sentence should be cancelled.

Throughout the war, I was worried that prisons would be bombed again; after all, Israel already targeted Evin Prison, where many were killed. The victims were locked up by one regime and murdered in their cells by another.

Resilience despite everything

Yet despite all that has taken place in recent years, Iran’s prisoners haven’t lost their resilience.

The ‘No to Execution’ movement began on 30 January 2024 at Ghezel Hesar prison. Death row inmates released a statement condemning the rise in executions, revealing that they faced imminent death without a fair trial or adequate legal representation. To urgently rally public support and awareness, they pledged to begin a hunger strike every Tuesday, a day associated with the transfer of inmates to solitary confinement before execution.

Over 2100 people were hanged in 2025. Iran’s regime is the leading executioner in the world per capita. But even as the regime continues to escalate its executions, over 62 prisons across the country are taking part in the hunger strike.

Zeynab also joined the strike and kept going, even after she was made to pay a heavy price. 18 years behind bars have not stopped her from speaking out about those oppressed and killed at the hands of brutal regimes, including the cases of Verisheh Moradi and Pakhshan Azizi, both women activists who were sentenced to death for supporting the Mahsa Amini protests. Jalalian asked the world not to be silent.

Now it is our turn to stand up for Zeynab, and help secure her release. That includes all the Western intellectuals who ignorantly echoed the regime’s so-called anti-imperialist slogans. After all, if anyone knows about the impact of imperialism, it is certainly Zeynab.

Her case risks being forgotten on the global stage; it is our duty to keep raising her name and story, and to pressure the regime at every opportunity. We have seen how the Islamic Republic has released prisoners following vocal campaigning and solidarity, so we know an act as simple as speaking up about Zeynab Jalalian can impact change.

We must #FreeZainabJalalian.

Nasrin Parvaz is an activist and author. Her works include ‘One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, A Prison Memoir’ (Award-Winner in the Women’s Issues category of the 2019 International Book Awards), and ‘The Secret Letters from X to A’. Nasrin has also written for The Guardian, The Morning Star, and Huck magazine, among others.

Source: The New Arab

I was a political prisoner in Iran — Tehran will use this moment to execute dissidents

In November 1982, Nasrin Parvaz planned to meet a friend and fellow activist in the Iranian capital, Tehran. She was shocked when her friend showed up at the meeting with an interrogator.

“I didn’t know he’d been arrested the day before,” Ms Parvaz, now 67 and based in Britain, told The i Paper. “He couldn’t take the torture, and named me. I was arrested.”

Ms Parvaz had been involved in demonstrations against the Iranian regime that had come to power following the revolution in 1979, bringing with it a fundamentalist and repressive interpretation of Shia Islam.

“The regime introduced misogynistic laws,” she said. “They said women had to cover their heads. Women did not have the right to divorce. Women had to have their husband’s permission to leave the country. Custody of children was the husband’s right. The law permitted men to kill their daughters and wives, and they went free.”

Ms Parvaz was taken to an interrogation centre for six months. “I was tortured because they wanted my contacts, and I wouldn’t give it to them,” she said. “My feet were lashed, so much so that I was paralysed for three weeks. The guards had to take me to the loo, and I couldn’t shower.”

She was transferred to Evin prison in Tehran, a notorious site holding thousands of prisoners, including hundreds of political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and dual nationals. The prison, sitting on a hilltop surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences, would become her home for most of the next seven years.

“Evin has a reputation of being a site of torture and oppression,” Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, told The i Paper. “Every major political dissident that has been arrested by the Islamic Republic of Iran has found themselves at Evin.”

Ms Parvaz was shown to a room meant to sleep five prisoners – instead, it housed 80 women and two children.

A prisoner walks in the Evin prison yard in Tehran, Iran October 17, 2022. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS PICTURE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY
An inmate in the Evin prison yard in Tehran in 2022 (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/Wana)

“I was beaten, but not like when I was at the interrogation centre,” she said. “I was put in solitary confinement, sometimes for months.”

She remembers becoming very ill in Evin with an unbearable pain in her stomach.

“I was at the point of dying,” she said. “I couldn’t eat anything and lost a dramatic amount of weight. They didn’t want to give me any treatment or medication, and said they would take me to hospital if I wrote my first confession – that I had made a mistake to struggle against the regime. I said I would not.”

Read more on The iPaper

A Letter From Evin Prison

Three women political prisoners have written to the people of Iran:

Greetings to our defiant people

We, the women political prisoners of Evin, condemn the destructive war waged by capitalist governments against all people. They are after only their own interests in securing their power through warmongering. This war brings nothing for people except destruction. People who have not caused these wars would be the main victims. We know that the people of Iran and the rest
of the world do not want war. That is because wars are imposed by governments to destroy, kill and repress human life.

We political prisoners are hostages of the regime in Iran. We are behind bars without the right to defend ourselves. Despite the unique circumstances imposed on us, it is for you that we worry, the dear freedom seeking people of Iran, from the bottom of our hearts.

We demand an end to the war that has been imposed on our people as soon as possible. We are asking you, the people, to demand an end to the war with your collective power.

Anisha Asadollahi, Nahid Khodajo, Nasrin KhezrJavadi – worker activists

Translated by Nasrin Parvaz
Nahid Khodajo was my prison cellmate during the 1980’s, when I was in prison for eight years. Nahid was in prison for seven years during the 80’s. She was arrested again in February 2024.

Woman Life Freedom, a Poem

Shot, handcuffed to the flag rod.

He asked for water
the guards held a cup of water
out of reach and said, ‘Take it.’

His mother came at dawn
with a bowl of water.
She was shot.

His sister came
with a bowl of water.
She was shot.

His cousin came
with a bowl of water.
She was shot.

His neighbour came
with a bowl of water.
She was shot.

His lover came at dusk
together with women.
Each holding a bowl of water.

Frightened
the guards ran away.

Nasrin Parvaz

 

Published in the water themed anthology “Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans” by Wee Sparrow poetry press. This poem was inspired by the killing of Khodanor Lajehie by the same method by the Islamic Regime of Iran in 2022.

Iran’s protests are not an angry outburst, but the result of generations of trauma

Women, life, freedom. These words have become the rallying cry for protest that has erupted in the wake of the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s feared morality police. They are shaking the Iranian regime to its core.

Unlike past movements, this uprising cuts across generations and social classes. For young Iranian women, Amini’s death ignited an explosion of pent-up fury at the regime’s suppression of women’s rights. For older activists like me, it has reopened the scars from previous uprisings and breathed new life into the decades-long struggle for freedom.

Demonstrations began in Tehran on 16 September soon after news of Mahsa’s killing broke. Within hours, women appeared in the streets, burning their hijabs and calling for justice. Within days, the protests spread. In towns and cities across Iran, schoolchildren have abandoned their classrooms to join the masses thronging the junctions and blocking streets.

The regime’s violent response has been brutal. Killings of protesters began immediately and hundreds have already lost their lives. Last Friday in the south-east city of Zahedan, as many as 91 people were killed when state forces opened fire, including five children. Doctors certified that they had been shot from behind. Despite the regime shutting down the internet across the country, videos of police violence continue to leak out, further fuelling public rage.

Universities that have acted as staging posts for protests are now under attack from regime forces. Last Sunday, police fired on peaceful protesters at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology and at least 40 students were blindfolded and taken away in vans. Like so many parents in Iran, their families have no idea where they are. After 16-year-old Nika Shahkarami’s battered body was returned to her family by police after she disappeared at a protest, many fear the worst.

Painting by Nasrin Parvaz
‘The regime’s violent response has been brutal.’ Illustration: Nasrin Parvaz

The roots of this uprising that Iranians are already calling a revolution can be found in a collective anger that has been suppressed for half a century. I became politically active soon after the Islamic regime took power and introduced its sexual apartheid laws. In 1982, I was arrested and taken to Joint Committee Interrogation Centre where I was tortured.

After hours of beatings, I was left paralysed for weeks, leaving me unable to shower or use the bathroom alone. The prison was so crowded I slept in a corridor for a month with dozens of other prisoners. We were blindfolded 24 hours a day, even eating and sleeping in darkness. Later, a guard bashed my head against the wall so hard I developed a brain tumour, an injury that troubles me to this day.

While the regime sentenced me to death, my sentence was commuted and I was eventually released in 1990. Soon after, I realised I was no longer safe, and fled to the UK. Since settling here, painting and writing have provided much relief, as has therapy from the organisation Freedom from Torture. But I am not “cured”. I still see the faces of my friends who were executed.

Ten years after I fled Iran, the regime turned the centre where I was interrogated into the Ebrat Museum. The torture chambers were preserved, with the regime claiming that they were used only by the forces of the shah, who was deposed in the 1979 revolution. But as the protests across the country demonstrate, the people have not forgotten. This is not just a burst of anger from a young and idealistic generation, but the accumulated trauma of generations of Iranians struggling for freedom.

Today, the regime is not just fighting to maintain its power but its very survival. Facing such anger from every section of society, it will kill or jail anyone who opposes it. But the people have come too far to turn back. If they give in and go home, there will be another massacre. They are fighting for their lives.

A nationwide day of action has been called for Saturday 8 October. I fear for the safety of my people. But I remain hopeful that they will sweep away the Islamic regime and realise the dreams of generations of Iranians who came before them.

  • Nasrin Parvaz is a women’s rights activist and torture survivor from Iran. Her books include A Prison Memoir: One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, and the novel The Secret Letters from X to A

Source: The Guardian