LONDON, Might 22 (IPS) – Narges Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights activism in Iran, has been allowed to go residence. After guards discovered her unconscious in her cell, the obvious sufferer of a coronary heart assault, she was granted non permanent launch from jail and transferred to a hospital. Nonetheless, she nonetheless faces the specter of being taken again to jail as soon as her situation has improved.
Mohammadi has been repeatedly imprisoned for criticising the theocratic regime, demanding girls’s rights, advocating for jail reform and campaigning towards the demise penalty. Over her lifetime she’s been sentenced to a complete of 44 years. She’s already spent greater than a decade behind bars, together with 161 days in solitary confinement, and has additionally been sentenced to 154 lashes. In February she was handed an additional seven-and-a-half-year sentence. From jail – the place she skilled cardiac and blood strain issues and extreme weight reduction – she has documented systematic rights violations towards political prisoners, together with sexual and bodily abuse of girls detainees, torture and in depth use of solitary confinement.
Mohammadi’s case is one amongst many. Whereas her ordeal has rightly drawn worldwide consideration, others extra distant from the highlight are at risk. Three extra girls human rights activists – Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Varisheh Moradi – are on demise row at imminent threat of execution. The risks they and numerous others face have grown sharply because the present battle started.
Repression tightens
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he needs regime change in Iran. On 1 March, an Israeli strike killed Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei. But when the intention was to topple the regime, it didn’t occur. Iran’s ruling theocratic buildings run deep, with a number of layers of deliberate succession. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, injured in the identical assault, was shortly named his substitute, regardless of Iran’s official ideology formally rejecting hereditary succession.
Whereas clerical leaders have been killed, Iran’s coercive equipment has gained in its day-to-day energy, hardening the theocracy into one thing nearer to a navy dictatorship, with the Basij, the paramilitary volunteer power lengthy deployed to crush public dissent, now entrance and centre.
Israeli and US hopes that Iranians would stand up towards the regime have been disenchanted. Iran has seen successive mass protest waves, every crushed with large-scale deadly violence. They embrace the Inexperienced Motion that demanded democracy in 2009 and 2010 and the Lady, Life, Freedom protests that demanded girls’s rights in 2022 and 2023. The newest rebellion got here in December 2025 and January 2026, triggered by financial collapse, forging a motion that united broad sections of society to demand an finish to the theocratic regime. The state suppressed it with surprising brutality, killing hundreds and detaining tens of hundreds.
By February, the rebellion had been crushed. The Israeli-US intervention was unlikely to reignite a significant mass protest motion. If something, for some Iranians the battle has stoked patriotism and extra intense enmity in the direction of Israel and the USA. The anticipated revolt merely hasn’t occurred.
A lot of Iran’s huge diaspora has rallied in help of the battle as a method of toppling the regime. However whereas the diaspora is united in demanding change, its array of ethnic minority organisations, Islamist factions, leftists, monarchists and republicans is bitterly divided over what ought to come subsequent. Reza Pahlavi, son of the final shah, enjoys some help however others are cautious about monarchical nostalgia and his shut ties to Israel and the USA. Probably the most credible potential unifying figures inside Iran are imprisoned or in any other case silenced.
As an alternative of dropping management, the regime has tightened its repression. Whilst Iran’s leaders wage a social media propaganda battle overseas, at residence they’ve imposed a near-total web shutdown, together with a block on VPN companies. The blackout has prompted immense financial hurt, disrupting companies and monetary transactions and hitting girls the toughest. This comes on prime of the financial results of the present US blockade of Iranian ports, sending inflation and unemployment hovering.
Underneath the duvet of battle and the web shutdown, the federal government has accelerated executions of political prisoners. Whereas exact figures are onerous to get, rights teams report near 200 executions to date this yr, most preceded by extended torture to extract false confessions. Secret hangings are reportedly being carried out on an virtually day by day foundation. Amongst these killed are folks detained through the January protests. On 4 Might, it was reported that three folks arrested at protests on 8 and 9 January – Ebrahim Dolatabadinejad, Mohammadreza Miri and Mehdi Rasouli – had been hanged. For households, the struggling doesn’t finish there, as authorities reportedly refuse to return our bodies and strain kinfolk to remain silent.
Native priorities
Democracy and human rights in Iran rely upon the regime’s departure. However the newest battle isn’t about any of this. For Netanyahu, with an election impending and anger remaining at his corruption expenses and Israel’s safety failures across the 7 October Hamas assaults, everlasting warfare is a political technique. Donald Trump’s many social media bulletins present little clue of what motivates a president who promised to not mire the USA in overseas wars, however distraction from low reputation scores and his many appearances within the Epstein information could also be an element.
This battle isn’t the way in which to attain change. The regime seems entrenched and able to surviving an extended battle. Any peace deal would depart it intact, which its rulers would deal with as a victory.
Actual change will come when protests can develop right into a mass motion giant sufficient to resist the deadly repression the state will inevitably deploy. That may solely occur with sustained help that respects the autonomy of native civil society leaders and strengthens their capability. The quick priorities should be to guard credible native sources of data amid the knowledge blackout and make sure the security and safety of Iran’s democracy and human rights activists.
Above all, states should press the Iranian authorities to halt executions and launch everybody detained for talking out, protesting and demanding change, starting with Narges Mohammadi. Momentary medical launch is nowhere close to sufficient. The Iranian regime should let her be free.
Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
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