Exclusive: Iranian Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi says returning to prison won’t stop her fight for equality

By Christiane Amanpour, Claire Calzonetti, Jaya Sharma and Lauren Kent, CNN

(CNN) — Iran’s most prominent human rights activist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi, said she will never stop fighting for democracy and equality, and she doesn’t fear retribution by the Iranian regime.

Speaking exclusively to CNN while on a three-week medical release from prison, Mohammadi said, “Not even the prison walls and all these convictions can ever stop me.”

Mohammadi has spent most of the past two decades as an inmate of Tehran’s Evin prison – notorious for housing critics of the regime.

Earlier this month, Iranian authorities suspended her prison term for 21 days to allow her to recover from a surgery she had in November to remove part of a bone in her lower right leg, where doctors had discovered a lesion suspected of being cancerous.

Mohammadi will soon be brought back to the notorious prison, where she is serving multiple sentences totaling 31 years, having been convicted of acting against national security and spreading propaganda.

Supporters say she’s a political prisoner, detained for working to advance women’s rights and democracy.

After the activist’s temporary release, her family posted video of her being wheeled out of an ambulance on a stretcher, her hair uncovered in defiance of Iran’s mandatory hijab law. In the footage, Mohammadi shouts “Woman, life, freedom” – the slogan of the protest movement sparked by the death of 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022, after she was arrested for allegedly not observing the hijab law.

“Whether I am inside Evin or outside Evin, my goal is very clear, and until we achieve democracy, we are not going to stop. We want freedom and we want equality,” Mohammadi told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview Tuesday. “So, whichever side of the wall I am, I will continue my struggle.”

Upon her temporary release, she was able to speak to her children on a video call for the first time in three years. She hasn’t seen them in person in almost a decade.

“I was amazed. I was actually a bit shocked. I felt that they had really grown up. And I felt that I’d lost a long period of being with them,” Mohammadi said.

“On many occasions when I was in prison, I felt the challenge of motherhood, versus being a human rights activist,” she added, noting that she has thought a lot about times when she wasn’t able to show up as a mother for her 18-year-old twins. “I don’t know whether they will forgive me or not. Of course, when I spoke to them, they said, ‘Oh, we are proud of you and we support you.’ But the truth of the matter is I feel that these children have bottled up so much and they have endured so much hardship. And maybe words cannot express or make up for this loss.”

Mohammadi and her family have criticized her short medical release as “too little, too late,” and called out the Iranian authorities’ poor treatment of prisoners more broadly.

Human rights groups have previously raised concerns about Mohammadi’s health and access to medical care in prison after she suffered from a series of heart attacks, breathing difficulties and the most recent bone lesion.

Mohammadi recalled instances where she herself had been “beaten up very badly” by prison guards and then refused medical care. “They started hitting me on the chest, whereas I was supposed to go for an angiography and my arteries were blocked,” she said of one incident. “Yet they were beating me on my chest.” CNN has contacted the Iranian government for its response to the allegations.

Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her promotion of human rights. Her children accepted the award on her behalf and read out a letter she wrote, which had been smuggled out of prison.

Discussing the resistance of her fellow female prisoners behind bars, Mohammadi struck an optimistic note: “They are changing prison to anti-prison. The walls of Evin Prison have cracked because of the chants of these women. That’s how I feel – that they’ve been cracked.”

Mohammadi has been writing her memoirs from prison, which she said is an attempt to show how the sparks of activism can spread hope in society. The Nobel laureate said that “this regime cannot be reformed,” and that she is calling for a non-violent “transition from the autocratic theocracy of the Islamic Republic… Our goal is to achieve democracy and a secular government.”

Asked whether she was concerned about potential consequences for speaking out again during her medical release, Mohammadi told CNN: “I am not at all worried about the consequences of this interview.”

“I have passed through all these stages, all these phases, and whatever punishment they impose on me, it makes no difference because I have my beliefs,” she said. “I am standing firm, and I am chanting against the death penalty. I am against gender apartheid, against the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“I am a pacifist. I am a woman who wants to realize women’s rights in Iran. So I think this is exactly where I should be.”

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CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh contributed to this report.