Shirin Ebadi
SHIRIN EBADI Shirin Ebadi Born in 1947, Hamadan/Iran
Lawyer and human rights activist. In 2003 she received as the first Muslim woman the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first female judge in the history of Iran.
She is guest of honour and godmother of the I. International Congress of Women's Museum in Merano.
Excerpts from WIKIPEDIA: “In 1975, she became the first woman to preside over a legislative court. Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, conservative clerics insisted that Islam prohibits women from becoming judges and Ebadi was demoted to a secretarial position at the branch where she had previously presided…
Ebadi now lectures law at the University of Tehran and is a campaigner for strengthening the legal status of children and women…
As a lawyer, she is known for taking up cases of liberal and dissident figures who have fallen foul of the judiciary, one of the bastions of hardline power in Iran…(Ebadi also represented the family of Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, the only officially accepted case of murder in the Iranian student protests of July 1999. In the process, in 2000 Ebadi was accused of distributing the videotaped confession of Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, a former member of one of the main "plainclothes" paramilitary forces, Ansar-e Hezbollah. …
Ebadi and Rohami were sentenced to five years in jail and suspension of their law licenses … The sentences were later vacated by the Islamic judiciary's supreme court… This case brought increased focus on Iran from human rights groups abroad)…
Ebadi has also defended various cases of child abuse …
Furthermore she established two non-governmental organizations in Iran, the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) and the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC). She also drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children, which was passed by the Iranian parliament in 2002.
In her book Iran Awakening, Ebadi explains her political/religious views on Islam, democracy and gender equality:“In the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with the conviction that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work." (1) Books written by her and published in English:
Lawyer and human rights activist. In 2003 she received as the first Muslim woman the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first female judge in the history of Iran.
She is guest of honour and godmother of the I. International Congress of Women's Museum in Merano.
Excerpts from WIKIPEDIA: “In 1975, she became the first woman to preside over a legislative court. Following the Iranian revolution in 1979, conservative clerics insisted that Islam prohibits women from becoming judges and Ebadi was demoted to a secretarial position at the branch where she had previously presided…
Ebadi now lectures law at the University of Tehran and is a campaigner for strengthening the legal status of children and women…As a lawyer, she is known for taking up cases of liberal and dissident figures who have fallen foul of the judiciary, one of the bastions of hardline power in Iran…(Ebadi also represented the family of Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, the only officially accepted case of murder in the Iranian student protests of July 1999. In the process, in 2000 Ebadi was accused of distributing the videotaped confession of Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, a former member of one of the main "plainclothes" paramilitary forces, Ansar-e Hezbollah. …
Ebadi and Rohami were sentenced to five years in jail and suspension of their law licenses … The sentences were later vacated by the Islamic judiciary's supreme court… This case brought increased focus on Iran from human rights groups abroad)…
Ebadi has also defended various cases of child abuse …
Furthermore she established two non-governmental organizations in Iran, the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child (SPRC) and the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC). She also drafted the original text of a law against physical abuse of children, which was passed by the Iranian parliament in 2002.
In her book Iran Awakening, Ebadi explains her political/religious views on Islam, democracy and gender equality:“In the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with the conviction that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work." (1) Books written by her and published in English:
- Biography: Iran Awakening. A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (New York, 2006 ) (1)
- Democracy, human rights, and Islam in modern Iran: Psychological, social and cultural perspectives. (Bergen, 2003)
- History and Documentation of Human Rights (New York, 2000)
- The Rights of the Child. A Study of legal Aspects of Children’s Rights in Iran (Tehran, 1994)
