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| Sunday, 12 October 2003 |
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Iranian lawyer Ebadi wins nobel peace prize TEHRAN, Saturday (Reuters) Iran's first woman judge before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi's work as a human rights activist has landed her in jail and seen her branded a threat to the Islamic system. A vocal campaigner for women's and children's rights, Ebadi, 56, has acted as defence lawyer for a wide range of political activists, earning a reputation for taking on cases others were too afraid to touch. "Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death," she told the Christian Science Monitor in a 1999 interview. "But I have learned to overcome my fear." The country's first woman judge, Ebadi was prevented from continuing in that role after the Islamic revolution when Sharia law was enforced. Women were too emotional and irrational to pass judgment in the courtroom, Iran's new leaders said. A lawyer, writer and part-time lecturer at Tehran University, Ebadi has spent much of her time since the revolution campaigning for better rights for women and children in her native country. She argued passionately that Sharia law could be adapted to modern times without undermining religion in the officially Shi'ite Islamic Republic. "The legal keys that Shia religion has given us enable us to transform and act according to the times," she wrote in a recent article. Ebadi found herself on the wrong side of the law in 2000, when she was accused of disseminating a politically-explosive videotape of a violent Islamic vigilante group member who confessed to links with conservative politicians in Iran. That incident landed Ebadi in Tehran's notorious Evin prison where scores of political dissidents are held. She was also banned from practicing law for five years. In solitary confinement there, she wrote: "Angrily I am trying to write on the cement wall with the bottom of my spoon that we are born to suffer because we are born in the Third World. Time and place are imposed upon us. So let's be patient as there is no other choice." |
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