HindustanTimes.com

Friday, October 10, 2003

Iran's Ebadi thorn in side of clerical hardliners

Reuters
Tehran, October 10

Iran's first woman judge before the 1979 Islamic revolution, Nobel Peace
Prize winner Shirin Ebadi's work as a human rights activist has landed her
in jail and seen her branded a threat to the Islamic system.

A vocal campaigner for women's and children's rights, Ebadi, 56, has acted
as defence lawyer for a wide range of political activists, earning a
reputation for taking on cases others were too afraid to touch.

"Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth
to death," she told the Christian Science Monitor in a 1999 interview.
"But I have learned to overcome my fear," she said.

The country's first woman judge, Ebadi was prevented from continuing in that
role after the Islamic revolution when Sharia law was enforced. Women were
too emotional and irrational to pass judgment in the courtroom, Iran's new
leaders said.

Now a lawyer, writer and part-time lecturer at Tehran University, Ebadi has
spent much of her time since the revolution campaigning for better rights
for women and children in her native country.

She argued passionately that Sharia law could be adapted to modern times
without undermining religion in the officially Shi'ite Islamic Republic.
"The legal keys that Shia religion has given us enable us to transform and
act according to the times," she wrote in a recent article.

Ebadi found herself on the wrong side of the law in 2000, when she was
accused of disseminating a politically explosive videotape of a violent
Islamic vigilante group member who confessed to links with conservative
politicians in Iran.

That incident landed Ebadi in Tehran's notorious Evin prison where scores of
political dissidents are held.

In solitary confinement there, she wrote: "Angrily I am trying to write on
the cement wall with the bottom of my spoon that we are born to suffer
because we are born in the Third World. Time and place are imposed upon us.
So let's be patient as there is no other choice."

Reformist political analyst Saeed Leylaz said Ebadi had "provided a lot of
legal help to political prisoners and those who had activities supporting
reforms."

"I'm very excited as an Iranian and I congratulate her," Leylaz said. "I
hope it helps to push reforms forward in Iran."

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