Do we like them?

Do we like Narges Mohammadi?

Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of speaking out for women and prisoners at huge personal cost, with no harmful words found, though we found nothing on LGBTQ+ rights specifically.

Narges Mohammadi was born in 1972 in Zanjan, in northern Iran, into a family from the Azeri minority. She got into activism as a physics student in Qazvin and was arrested at least twice while still studying. Her November 2021 arrest was her twelfth, by her own count, and she has lived much of her adult life in and out of prison.

She turned that experience into work for other people. Her 2020 book White Torture collects interviews with women held in solitary confinement, and she wrote a New York Times piece about inmates chanting during the 2022 protests. In 2023 she won the Nobel Peace Prize while locked up in Evin prison, only the second Iranian woman to win it, after Shirin Ebadi.

The latest chapter started in December 2025. She travelled to Mashhad for a memorial for the lawyer Khosrow Alikordi, and says security forces attacked her with batons before arresting her. She was accused of “cooperation with the State of Israel”, and a prosecutor said the gathering was organised by people linked to Alikordi. The Norwegian Nobel Committee condemned her “brutal arrest” and called for her unconditional release.

In February 2026 her lawyer said she had been sentenced to seven and a half years: six for assembly and collusion against national security and a year and a half for propaganda. The terms run together, so she is expected to serve six, plus two years of internal exile and a two-year travel ban. She had been on a week-long hunger strike, and she was filmed at the Mashhad memorial urging mourners to chant “Long live Iran”.

Now the harm check. Her public record is about women's rights, human rights and ending discrimination, and she has opposed war: in June 2025 she wrote “I demand an immediate halt to the war and the declaration of a ceasefire.” We found no harmful statements, no dodgy company and no slide into conspiracy talk. The honest gap is LGBTQ+ rights: no statement from her turned up, for or against, so we can't credit her on that front.

The good stuff is the whole career. She has kept campaigning from inside prison, and her family says she has now been sentenced to 44 years and 154 lashes across all her cases. That is the price of a woman refusing to be quiet, and she has said she will “continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression.”