Jailed Nobel Peace Prize Winner Mohammadi Taken to Hospital – Without Hijab

Iranian authorities transferred Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin prison, to a hospital after she launched a hunger strike earlier this week, her husband says. 

Taghi Rahmani said on November 8 that the human rights activist “was taken to the hospital without the mandatory hijab for medical tests.”

Rahmani, who is a political activist, said that the prison doctor's had recommended her "immediate hospitalization" due to a "50-percent blockage of two heart vessels.”

Mohammadi had been prevented from receiving medical treatment because she refused to wear a head covering for a hospital visit.

She began a hunger strike on November 6 over being blocked along with other inmates from getting medical care and to protest the Islamic Republic’s mandatory headscarf rules for women, her family said.

Hours before her transfer to hospital, seven fellow women inmates started their own hunger strike “in a resolute display of solidarity [with Mohammadi] and to protest the enduring injustices of the oppressive government,” according to a post on Mohammadi’s Instagram page, which is managed by her relatives

Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month for keeping up her fight against the “oppression of women” in her country despite numerous arrests and spending years behind bars.

On November 7, the Norwegian Nobel Committee expressed deep concern about the activist’s health and urged the authorities to provide her and other female inmates with “whatever medical assistance they may need.”

“The requirement that female inmates must wear a hijab in order to be hospitalized, is inhumane and morally unacceptable,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, who chairs the committee, said in a statement. “Narges Mohammadi's initiation of a hunger strike demonstrates the seriousness of the situation.”