Nasrin Sotoudeh

Nasrin Sotoudeh was born in Tehran and studied law, but after passing the bar exam in 1995 she had to wait eight years before the authorities would grant her a licence to practise. Once she had it she took on the cases that carried the most risk: children sentenced to death, prisoners of conscience, and women from the One Million Signatures campaign against discriminatory laws. She also represented the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and several of the young people arrested after the disputed election of 2009.

In September 2010 she was arrested herself, charged with spreading propaganda and acting against national security, and sentenced to eleven years, later cut to six. In Evin prison she went on hunger strike more than once, including a seven-week strike over restrictions on visits from her two children. She was released in 2013, and the European Parliament awarded her its Sakharov Prize in her absence.

In 2018 she defended women who had stood on utility boxes in Tehran and waved their headscarves on sticks. She was arrested again that June, and in 2019 was sentenced to a total of 38 years and 148 lashes, of which twelve years were to be served. Her husband, Reza Khandan, was also jailed for campaigning on her behalf. In 2020 she held a hunger strike of more than 40 days to protest the conditions of political prisoners during the pandemic. She has since been let out on medical furloughs and taken back in, and in 2023 was beaten and arrested while attending the funeral of a teenage girl who had died after an encounter with the morality police.