In what amounts to the hailing of a courageous human rights activist and a stinging rebuke of Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to imprisoned Iranian women’s rights advocate Narges Mohammadi.

The award-making committee said the prize honoured those behind the recent and unprecedented demonstrations in Iran and called for the release of Mohammadi, 51, who has campaigned for three decades for women’s rights and abolition of the death penalty.

“We hope to send the message to women all around the world that are living in conditions where they are systematically discriminated: ‘Have the courage, keep on going’,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told Reuters.

“We want to give the prize to encourage Narges Mohammadi and the hundreds of thousands of people who have been crying for exactly ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ in Iran,” she added, referring to the protest movement’s main slogan.

Source of inspiration

The United Nations was swift in its reaction to her award.

“Women in Iran have been a source of inspiration for the world. We have seen their courage and determination in the face of reprisals, intimidation and violence,” Liz Throssell, spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva, said.

“We call for her release and the release of all human rights defenders jailed in Iran.”

French President Emmanuel Macron also paid tribute to Narges Mohammadi’s bravery.

There was no immediate official reaction from Iran, which has called the protests foreign-led subversion.

Defiant behind bars

Mohammadi was quoted by the New York Times as saying she would never stop striving for democracy and equality, even if that meant staying in prison.

“I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women,” the newspaper quoted her as saying in a statement, which it said was issued after the Nobel announcement.

Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Tehran’s Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years imprisonment, one of the many periods she has been detained behind bars, according to the Front Line Defenders rights organisation.

Charges include spreading propaganda against the state.

She is the deputy head of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre, a non-governmental organisation led by Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who lives in exile.

“I congratulate Narges Mohammadi and all Iranian women for this prize,” Ebadi told Reuters.

“This prize will shed light on violation of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic… which unfortunately has proven that it cannot be reformed.”

Mohammadi’s family reacts

Mohammadi’s husband Taghi Rahmani applauded as he watched the announcement on TV at his home in Paris.

“This Nobel Prize will embolden Narges’ fight for human rights, but more importantly, this is in fact a prize for the ‘woman, life and freedom’ movement,” he told Reuters.

Her brother, Hamidreza Mohammadi, said he was “overwhelmed” when watching the announcement and that the prize would strengthen the work of his sister and other activists.

“She will feel much stronger in her endeavours for human rights in Iran and for everyone who hopes for a better situation in Iran,” he told Reuters in Oslo.

Arrested more than a dozen times in her life, and held three times in Evin prison since 2012, Mohammadi has been unable to see her husband for 15 years and her children for seven.

Her prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns or about $1.6 million, will be presented in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.

Iran’s denial

Mohammadi’s award came as rights groups reported that an Iranian teenage girl was hospitalised in a coma after a confrontation on the Tehran metro for not wearing a hijab.

Iranian authorities deny the reports.

The Nobel Committee’s honouring of Mohammadi also came just over a year after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iranian morality police for allegedly flouting the Islamic Republic’s dress code for women.

That provoked months of protests that posed the biggest challenge to Shi’ite clerical rule in years, and was met with a deadly security crackdown costing several hundred lives.

—AAP with DPA