Shirin Ebadi

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, former judge, human rights defender and writer, born in Hamadan on 21 June 1947. She was one of Iran's first female judges and presided over the Tehran city court from 1975. She founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. She received the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize "for her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children" — the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize. ^{1 2}

She was born in Hamadan in northwestern Iran into an academic Muslim family. Her father, Mohammad Ali Ebadi, was the city's chief notary public and a professor of commercial law who wrote several books; her mother, Minu Yamini, devoted her time to the children. The family moved to Tehran when she was one year old. ^{3 2}

She entered the University of Tehran's law faculty in 1965 and graduated in 1969 after three and a half years. She passed the judges' examinations and became a judge in March 1969 after a six-month internship. While serving as a judge she continued her studies and received a doctorate with honours from the University of Tehran in 1971. ^{3 2}

In 1975 she became the first woman to preside over the Tehran city court, and she held the post until the 1979 revolution. After the revolution, the new leaders held that women were unfit to judge: she and her female colleagues were removed, and she was demoted to a clerkship in the very court she had presided over. After the women protested, they were given "expert" posts in the Ministry of Justice; Ebadi could not accept the situation and resigned. ^{2 3 1}

She chose to work as a private lawyer, but the authorities repeatedly rejected her applications. She spent years at home writing books and articles until she obtained a licence to practise law in 1992 and opened her own practice. ^{3 2}

In 1994 she founded the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child in Iran, and in 2001 she co-founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center with other lawyers and became its president. ^{2 3}

She took up prominent cases, among them representing the family of Dariush Forouhar and his wife Parvaneh Eskandari, the opposition figures murdered in 1998, and families of the victims of the serial murders of writers and activists in the late 1990s. ^{3 2}

In the case of Arian Golshani, a nine-year-old killed by her father and uncle after a court had given the father custody, Ebadi organised a campaign to raise awareness of the custody laws, and her efforts and others' won divorced mothers the right to custody of their children of both sexes until the age of seven. She helped draft an anti-child-abuse law that the Iranian parliament passed in 2002. ^{3 2}

She also represented the mother of the photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died in custody in 2003, and volunteered for the family of the student Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, killed in the police raid on Tehran University in 1999. During that case she filmed the testimony of a paramilitary member who confessed that his group had carried out the attack; she was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison and a suspension of her licence in the 2000 "tape makers" case, then released on bail, and the supreme court later vacated the sentence. The Arabic article reports that, while reading the serial-murder files, she discovered that her own name was on the assassination target list. ^{3 2}

The prize was announced on 10 October 2003. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said its choice also expressed a wish to ease tensions between the Islamic world and the West after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and to extend a hand to the Iranian reform movement. ¹

Her win sparked wide debate inside Iran: conservative newspapers described the prize as part of a foreign pressure campaign, and the reformist president Mohammad Khatami called it political and unimportant. ^{3 2}

In December 2008 the authorities raided the offices of the Defenders of Human Rights Center and closed them. Ebadi has lived in exile in London since June 2009. In November 2009 she said the authorities had seized her Nobel medal and diploma from a bank box; Norway's foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre condemned what he described as the first alleged confiscation of a Nobel Prize by state authorities, while Iran denied it. Her sister Noushin Ebadi was detained on 29 December 2009, and her husband was later forced, by her account, to deliver a televised denunciation of her after being arrested and tortured. ^{2 3}

Her books in English include Iran Awakening (2006), written with Azadeh Moaveni; Refugee Rights in Iran (2008); The Golden Cage (2011); and Until We Are Free (2016). ²

This section should be read as a report of different positions carried by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

Her positions, as the sources report them: In Iran Awakening she wrote that an interpretation of Islam in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith, and she advocated taking political power out of the hands of the clergy and separating religion and state. She initially supported the 1979 revolution, then came to see it as a personal defeat after she was removed from the judiciary and veiling was imposed. She supported the One Million Signatures campaign to change laws discriminating against women and defended its participants in court. ^{2 1 3}

She at first defended Iran's nuclear programme as a matter of national pride, then said in a 2012 interview that the Iranian people wanted uranium enrichment stopped and the government would not respond. In 2018 she told Bloomberg that the Islamic Republic was unreformable and called for a referendum. She volunteered to defend arrested Baháʼí leaders; the state news agency IRNA attacked her and accused her daughter of converting to the Baháʼí faith, and she replied, in the words quoted by the English article: "I am proud to say that my family and I are Shiites." In March 2026 Reza Pahlavi announced her appointment to head a Transitional Justice Regulations Drafting Committee, and Time magazine named her among the 100 most influential people of 2026. ^{2 3}

Criticism and accusations directed at her: Conservative Iranian media greeted her prize with suspicion, describing it as a tool of foreign pressure, and President Khatami called it political. According to the Arabic article, the authorities fabricated an adultery charge and a stoning sentence against her husband and withdrew them in exchange for his televised statement against her. The museum presents these positions and accusations as the sources report them, without adopting any of them. ^{3 2}

In 1975 she married Javad Tavassolian, an electrical engineer; they have two daughters, Negar and Narges. She separated from him during her exile. ³

Before the Nobel she received the Rafto Prize for human rights in 2001, then the JPM Interfaith Award in 2004; Forbes listed her among the world's 100 most powerful women in 2004, and she received the French Legion of Honour in 2006. In 2006 she co-founded the Nobel Women's Initiative with other women laureates. ²

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• The Arabic article dates her law licence to 1992, while the English article describes her return to practice as not achieved until 1993; this article uses the licence date (1992) and records the difference here.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.