Shirin Ebadi
The Nobel Peace Prize isn't the first human rights award for Shirin Ebadi. Like other Nobel laureates, including Aung San Suu Kyi, Ebadi was previously awarded the Thorolf Rafto Prize (in 2001). She has also been recognized by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for her fight for human rights and democracy in Iran.
Ebadi has taken on the human rights fight in Iran at great personal cost. She has been threatened, jailed and banned from practising law in her own country.
Ebadi was born in 1947 and grew up in Iran. She has a degree in law from the University of Tehran, and became the country's first female judge. From 1975 to 1979, she was president of the city court of Tehran. Ebadi was forced to resign when conservative Islamic clerics took control of the country in 1979.
She has since been an activist for democracy and the rights of refugees, women and children. She is well-known for her work representing writers and intellectuals killed in in the late 1990s, in the so-called serial murders of dissidents.
One of her most famous cases was looking into the murders of Dariush and Paryaneh Foruhar, two dissidents who died in 1998. Pressure by Ebadi and other activists led President Mohammad Khatami to call for an investigation. The deaths and several others at the time were eventually blamed on hard-line "rogue agents" in the Intelligence Ministry. The intelligence minister resigned as a result.
She also worked to reveal who was behind the attack at Tehran University in 1999 in which several students died.
Ebadi was arrested in 2000, and spent three weeks in jail before having a closed trial on charges of "disturbing public opinion." She was given a suspended sentence, and banned from practising law for five years.
Hard-line ayatollahs accuse her of trying to single-handedly undermine Iran's Islamic revolution, but Ebadi says, "there is no difference between Islam and human rights. Therefore, the religious ones should also welcome this award. The prize means you can be a Muslim and at the same time have human rights."
A biography issued by the Nobel Committee says: "With Islam as her starting point, Ebadi campaigns for peaceful solutions to social problems, and promotes new thinking on Islamic terms. She has displayed great personal courage as a lawyer defending individuals and groups who have fallen victim to a powerful political and legal system that is legitimized through an inhumane interpretation of Islam."
Ebadi is the founder and leader of the Association for Support of Children's Rights in Iran. She has written a number of academic books and articles focused on human rights. Among her books translated into English are The Rights of the Child: A Study of Legal Aspects of Children's Rights in Iran (Tehran, 1994), published with support from UNICEF, and History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran (New York, 2000).
She is married and has two daughters, aged 20 and 23. Ebadi lives in Tehran, where she works as a lawyer and teaches at the University of Tehran.
Ebadi is the 11th woman, the third Muslim, and the first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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