Nobel laureate’s smuggled memoir details beatings and neglect in Iranian prisons | Iran
Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammedi described the “torture” of solitary confinement and systematic medical neglect by the prison system in an exclusive excerpt of writing smuggled from prison in Iran.
Writings from the past decade will form part of a soon-to-be-published memoir that provides a rare and worrying insight into the treatment of Muhammadi, who was in critical condition. It details beatings, constant interrogations, deprivation of medical care, and prolonged solitary confinement during multiple prison sentences.
“There is no worse hardship than imprisonment combined with illness,” he wrote. “Authoritarian regimes don’t always need a hangman’s noose. Sometimes they just wait for the human body to fail.”
After those words were written and he was rearrested, Mohammadi’s health reached another crisis point this year and his weight dropped by more than 20 kg. He was found unconscious in his cell after a heart attack in March.
His family and doctors’ requests for him to receive appropriate medical treatment from his team of surgeons were denied for weeks. He was released on bail on Sunday to receive treatment from the medical team in Tehran. His condition remains critical.
His family said his continued detention and denial of proper medical care constituted a “slow execution.”
Mohammadi wrote about how the tensions he experienced in prison seriously damaged his health. He suffers from pulmonary embolism, seizures, multiple infections, chest pain and other life-threatening medical events in prison, and describes his agonizing wait for often inadequate medical care.
The writings were smuggled in by Mohammedi’s fellow inmates and visitors during his stay in Iran’s notorious Evin, Qarchak and Zanjan prisons, at serious risk to their own safety. Over the past decade, they have had to be rewritten several times after the pages or notebooks were found and destroyed by guards.
Her memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, will be published in September. The film covers Mohammadi’s early life, how his parents helped inspire his political beliefs, his path to activism, and the many years he spent in prison due to public protests.
Mohammadi was arrested 14 times in Iran for her activities in promoting women’s rights, improving the conditions of prisoners, and ending the regime’s use of the death penalty.
Due to numerous convictions, he was sentenced to 44 years in prison and 154 lashes. The campaigner was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 while she was in prison during the Women, Life, Freedom protests.
In December 2024, he was released with a temporary suspended sentence following a series of health events, but was violently re-arrested a year later and sentenced to several more years in prison in February.
