Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has launched a hunger strike from prison to demand access to phone calls, her lawyers and family, her Paris-based attorney said, as authorities tighten restrictions on one of the country’s most prominent human rights defenders.
Mohammadi, 53, was arrested on Dec. 12 in the eastern city of Mashhad and “has been on hunger strike for the last three days,” lawyer Chirinne Ardakani told AFP. “She is demanding her right to make a phone call, have access to her lawyers in Iran and to be visited,” Ardakani said.
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Ardakani added that Mohammadi’s last phone call to her family took place on Dec. 14 and that relatives learned of the hunger strike only through a detainee recently freed. “There is no means with which to communicate with her,” the lawyer said.
Supporters say the refusal to allow phone contact is a deliberate attempt to silence Mohammadi, who has repeatedly issued sharply worded statements during prior imprisonments, and to prevent her from commenting on the current climate inside Iran. Her foundation said this week that prosecutors have conditioned her phone access on obeying unspecified “rules,” asserting that a basic legal right was being made “dependent on silence and self-censorship.”
Mohammadi won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel committee called her two-decade struggle for human rights and against the oppression of women in the Islamic Republic. A veteran campaigner against the death penalty and solitary confinement, she strongly backed the 2022–2023 protest movement sparked by the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman detained by the country’s morality police.
Mohammadi has long predicted the eventual downfall of the clerical system that has ruled Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Her twin children live in Paris with her husband and accepted the Nobel award in Oslo on her behalf in 2023. She has not seen them for more than a decade.
Her latest arrest came shortly before protests flared nationwide later in December and peaked in January. Activists say security forces’ crackdown has left thousands dead. More than 50,000 people have been arrested, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).
Mohammadi’s foundation said authorities have continued detaining civil society figures in recent weeks. Among those arrested, it said, are screenwriter Mehdi Mahmoudian; former student leader Abdollah Momeni; and women’s rights activist Vida Rabbani. The group said they were detained after signing a joint statement with other activists condemning what they called an “organised state crime against humanity” in the crackdown.
Iran has not publicly commented on Mohammadi’s hunger strike or the reported restrictions on her communication. Rights groups say that cutting detainees off from legal counsel and family contact is a recurring tactic used to increase pressure and curb public advocacy from behind bars.
For Mohammadi, the reported conditions underscore the stakes of her continued defiance. Even from prison, she has remained a galvanizing figure for the movement that surged after Amini’s death, drawing global recognition with the Nobel honor and intensifying scrutiny of Iran’s treatment of political prisoners. Supporters warn that conditioning access to basic rights on silence risks further isolating detainees while obscuring what is happening inside the country’s detention system.
Ardakani and Mohammadi’s foundation have urged authorities to restore immediate phone access, allow regular visits and provide unhindered contact with her legal team in Iran. As her hunger strike enters another day with no confirmed communication from her jailers, fears are growing for her health — and for the fate of dissent in a country still roiled by the aftershocks of protest.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
