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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s rights activist. In 2008, aged 27, while visiting a girls\u2019 high school to talk about International Women\u2019s Day, she was arrested. She was subsequently tortured and sentenced to execution for \u201cenmity against God\u201d.<\/p>\n
Zeynab Jalalian<\/a>\u00a0and 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\u2019s unrelenting fight was what changed my fate.<\/p>\n Zeynab\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Writing to her mother a few years ago, Zeynab depicted the torture she was forced to endure:<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Despite her life sentence, she is denied any peace in her cell, and her health has deteriorated due to the torture inflicted on her.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This war has been waged against the people of Iran\u00a0and its prisoners.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s prisoners should be released and that the death sentence should be cancelled.<\/p>\n Throughout the war, I was worried that prisons would be bombed again; after all, Israel already\u00a0targeted Evin Prison<\/a>, where many were killed. The victims were locked up by one regime and murdered in their cells by another.<\/p>\n Yet despite all that has taken place in recent years, Iran\u2019s prisoners haven\u2019t lost their resilience.<\/p>\n The \u2018No to Execution\u2019 movement began on 30 January 2024 at\u00a0Ghezel Hesar<\/a>\u00a0prison. 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.<\/p>\n Over 2100 people were hanged in 2025. Iran\u2019s regime is the\u00a0leading executioner<\/a>\u00a0in the world per capita. But even as the regime continues to escalate its executions, over\u00a062 prisons<\/a>\u00a0across the country are taking part in the hunger strike.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Verisheh Moradi<\/a>\u00a0and Pakhshan Azizi, both women activists who were sentenced to death for supporting the Mahsa Amini protests. Jalalian asked the world not to be silent.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s so-called anti-imperialist slogans. After all, if anyone knows about the impact of imperialism, it is certainly Zeynab.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n We must #FreeZainabJalalian.<\/p>\n Nasrin Parvaz is an\u00a0activist and author<\/a>. Her works include \u2018One Woman’s Struggle in Iran, A Prison Memoir\u2019 (Award-Winner in the Women\u2019s Issues category of the 2019 International Book Awards), and \u2018The Secret Letters from X to A\u2019. Nasrin has also written for The Guardian, The Morning Star, and Huck magazine, among others.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Source: The New Arab<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading The world must call on Iran to release Zeynab Jalalian<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"link","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[36,14,17],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-link","hentry","category-articles","tag-execution","tag-prison","tag-women","post_format-post-format-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nasrinparvaz.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Since the US-Israel war on Iran<\/h2>\n
Resilience despite everything<\/h2>\n