Who is Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner

Narges Mohammadi is the winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday.

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all," the committee said in its citation.

Mohammadi is one of Iran's leading human rights activists, who has campaigned for women's rights and the abolition of the death penalty.

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She is currently serving multiple sentences in Tehran's Evin Prison amounting to about 12 years imprisonment, according to the Front Line Defenders rights organization, one of the many periods she has held behind bars.

Charges include spreading propaganda against the state.

Mohammadi's award comes after a wave of protests that swept Iran after the death in custody a year ago of a young Iranian Kurd, Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested for violating Iran's strict dress rules for women.

Mohammadi was picked from 351 candidates this year for the world's most significant peace prize.

They included 259 individuals and 92 organizations.

Mohammadi joins the ranks of Mother Teresa, former US President Jimmy Carter and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines as winners of the world's most famous peace prize.

Who is Narges Mohammadi?

Iranian campaigner Narges Mohammadi has for decades campaigned on the most sensitive issues in the Islamic Republic.

She has opposed pillars of the clerical system including capital punishment and the obligatory hijab, and defiantly refuses to give up her campaigning even behind bars.

She has not seen her children for eight years, has spent most of her recent life in prison and acknowledges there is no immediate prospect of release.

First arrested 22 years ago, the 51-year-old has spent much of the past two decades in and out of jail over her unstinting campaigning for human rights in Iran.

She has most recently been incarcerated since November 2021.

Born in 1972 in Zanjan, in the northwest of Iran, Mohammadi studied physics before becoming an engineer.

But she then launched a new career in journalism, working for newspapers that were at the time part of the reformist movement.

In the 2000s, she joined the Center for Human Rights Defenders, founded by the Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, fighting in particular for the abolition of the death penalty.

In her book "White Torture", Mohammadi denounced prisoners' conditions of detention, in particular the use of solitary confinement, which she says she herself also suffered.

Regular updates about the situation in prison are posted on her Instagram account run by her family. 

Mohammadi told AFP in September she was currently serving a combined sentence of 10 years and nine months in prison, had also been sentenced to 154 lashes and had five cases against her linked to her activities in jail alone.

Amnesty International describes her as a prisoner of conscience who has been arbitrarily detained.

While she could only witness from behind bars the protests that broke out following the death in September last year, of Jina Mahsa Amini — who had been arrested for violating Iran's strict dress rules for women — she says the movement made clear the levels of dissatisfaction in society.

Mohammadi and fellow inmates staged a symbolic protest in the yard of Evin prison by burning their headscarves during the anniversary of Mahsa Amini's death.

Who won the peace prize last year?

Last year, the Nobel prize went to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.

The decision was seen as a strong rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart and ally Alexander Lukashenko.

This year, the field was said to be wide open, with women's rights campaigners, climate activists or international courts investigating war crimes thought to be among the possible winners.

The Peace Prize is the only one of the Nobel prizes to be awarded in Oslo, rather than Stockholm.

This year, the prizes are worth 11 million krona ($990,000) in each category.

Last 10 Nobel winners

Here is a list of the 10 most recent winners of the Nobel Peace Prize:

2022: Ales Bialiatski (Belarus), Memorial (Russia) and the Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine).

2021: Maria Ressa (Philippines/United States) and Dmitry Muratov (Russia)

2020: The UN World Food Programme (WFP)

2019: Abiy Ahmed Ali (Ethiopia)

2018: Denis Mukwege (DR Congo) and Nadia Murad (Iraq)

2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

2016: Juan Manuel Santos (Colombia)

2015: The National Dialogue Quartet (Tunisia)

2014: Kailash Satyarthi (India) and Malala Yousafzai (Pakistan)

2013: The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)

Peace Prize wraps up week of accolades

Over the past week, the medicine, physics, chemistry and literature prizes have been announced in Sweden.

The Nobel Committee awarded writer Jon Fosse the prize in literature.

The chemistry prize went to Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology Inc. Hungarian-American Katalin Kariko.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine. The pair developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines

The physics prize went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L'Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz.

The final prize in economics is to be announced on Monday.