Prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, imprisoned for three years for her work, has risked further detention by speaking in Tehran to Simon Tisdall of The Guardian of London.

Sotoudeh was detained in September 2010 and sentenced to 11 years in prison after she spoke with Western media — in one case without wearing hijab — about her defense of juveniles, activists, and other human rights cases.

The lawyer went on hunger strike for 49 days in late 2012 to protest the regime’s treatment of prisoners.

She was released in October 2013 after the Rouhani Government promised a more lenient attitude to political priosners.


Nasrin Sotoudeh’s seven-year-old son, Nima, wants to go out to play. His mother, the leading Iranian human rights lawyer whose arbitrary imprisonment in 2010 sparked an international campaign to free her, has been talking for ages. Nima is bored.

At the door to their apartment in north-west Tehran, Nasrin takes Nima in her arms. The boy stands on tip-toe to embrace his mother. They hold each other for a minute or more. It is as though the two cannot bear to be separated.

If so, it is hardly surprising. Nima was only three when the silent men from Iran’s ministry of intelligence came for his mother in 2009. Nobody knew if she was ever coming back. Her initial jail sentence was 11 years. She was held in solitary confinement, denied visits and phone calls. Her health deteriorated, she lost weight. There were rumours she had disappeared. Then, unexpectedly, Sotoudeh was released, without explanation or apology, last September.

Nima never wants to let her go again.

Speaking candidly to the Guardian despite a risk that the interview may provoke official retribution, Sotoudeh said it was Nima who was indirectly responsible for her first hunger strike, which attracted international attention to her plight.

“Before the 2009 election I was threatened many times for my work as a human rights lawyer but there was no serious problem. But after the election, things changed.

“I was at a meeting of the Professional Women Lawyers Association. Suddenly the door was thrown open and some intelligence police came in. They showed me a warrant from the court and they told me to come to the court after three days. I went, and they arrested me.

“At the same time, five men went to my house and searched it. They took some personal items away. I had written a diary about Nima, every day from the day of his birth, and they took this away.

“When I was in prison I asked them to return the diary and the other personal items. For two weeks I did not even have a telephone to call my husband. So I went on hunger strike for three days. Then they gave me a telephone and returned all the items to my house.”

It was a small victory, and an important one, but Sotoudeh’s incarceration was only beginning. After a lengthy and often frightening interrogation, she was eventually charged with “acting against national security” and “propaganda against the regime”.

Sotoudeh was sentenced to 11 years in prison, barred from practising law for 20 years, and banned from leaving Iran. An appeal court reduced the sentence to six years and her law ban to 10 years.

In May 2010, nine months after she was taken, Sotoudeh wrote to Nima from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where she was held in Ward 209, reserved for political prisoners and run by the intelligence ministry.

Writing on tissue paper (which was all that was available to her), she tried to explain the inexplicable, and to bridge the gulf of fear and incomprehension that she worried was growing up between her and her son.

“Hello my dearest Nima,” it began. “Writing a letter to you my dear Nima is so very difficult. How do I tell you where I am when you are so innocent and too young to comprehend the true meaning of words such as prison, arrest, sentence, trial, injustice, censorship, oppression versus liberation, freedom, justice, equality?”

“How do I explain that coming home is not up to me, that I am not free to rush back to you, when I know that you had told your father to ask me to finish my work so I can come back home? How do I explain that in the past six months I was not afforded the right to see you for even one hour?

“My dear Nima, in the past six months, I found myself crying uncontrollably on two occasions. The first time was when my father passed away and I was deprived of grieving and attending his funeral. The second was the day you asked me to come home and I couldn’t come home with you. I returned to my cell and sobbed without control.”

There were other bad moments — many of them, in truth — though Sotoudeh is a modest, self-effacing woman who is loath to dramatise her experiences.

For many Iranians, especially younger women, she is a national hero, though their praise is rendered privately, not spoken out loud. Despite winning the European parliament’s 2012 Sakharov prize, and several other awards, Sotoudeh says she always feels surprised when people tell her she is famous.

Read full article….