Shirin Ebadi
One of Iran’s first female judges, demoted to clerk after the revolution, who became a human rights lawyer
Shirin Ebadi was born in Hamadan in 1947 and grew up in Tehran in a family that, unusually, treated its daughters and sons the same. She studied law and in 1969 became one of the first women judges in Iran; by 1975 she was presiding over a bench of the Tehran city court. After the 1979 revolution the new authorities decided that women were too emotional to judge, and she was demoted to a clerk in the court she had run. She resigned in protest and for years could not get a licence to practise law at all.
She was finally admitted to the bar in 1992 and began taking cases nobody wanted: the families of dissident writers murdered in 1998, a student killed in the 1999 protests, abused children, and women trying to change custody and inheritance laws under which a woman's testimony was worth half a man's. In 2000 she was jailed for three weeks and given a suspended sentence for circulating evidence of official involvement in attacks on students. She also wrote on the rights of children and founded a centre to defend political prisoners.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the first Muslim woman to do so, and used the money to fund human rights work. Pressure on her increased: her office was raided, her sister and husband were detained, and in 2009 the authorities seized her Nobel medal from a bank vault. She was abroad when the disputed 2009 election took place and has not been able to return.