A Fifty Day Stand for Freedom
By Karin Deutsch Karlekar and Amir Soltani
After nearly 50 days of forgoing food, Iranian women’s rights activist and PEN America Freedom to Write honoree Nasrin Sotoudeh ended her hunger strike. It was her second this year, begun to protest not merely her unjust detention but the plight of all political prisoners languishing in Iran’s prisons amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, while some governments — even here in the over-incarcerated U.S. — have taken overdue steps to reduce prison populations, others have weaponized the pandemic to punish, silence, and endanger political dissidents. Sotoudeh’s situation is emblematic, a case study in how authoritarian regimes are turning the pandemic into a death sentence against their most prominent critics.
Though her body is held hostage by a theocracy that denies women their basic human rights, Nasrin’s hunger strike converted her constitution — the very fabric of her being — into a searing, if silent, form of speech, an expression not only of her freedom but of the dignity, courage, and strength of the human spirit.
Although Iran has freed more than 100,000 prisoners since the virus began spreading in March, political prisoners (a number of whom have reportedly contracted COVID-19) have largely been excluded from these humanitarian furloughs. Sotoudeh’s hunger strike did not go unnoticed. Her husband Reza Khandan reported that the Iranian prosecutors had frozen their family’s bank accounts since May. On August 17, a week after Sotoudeh announced her hunger strike, state security officers temporarily arrested her 21 year old daughter, Mehraveh Khandan, in an apparent bid to break her resistance.
Hunger strikes impose a significant toll on the human body, particularly for an individual who has undertaken them in the past or has underlying health conditions. On September 19, Sotoudeh was rushed to a cardiac care unit when her health began to flag. During a 49-day hunger strike in 2012 during which she subsisted on salt and sugar water, her weight dropped to 95 pounds.
Sotoudeh’s struggle for freedom and equality has all the hallmarks of so many others’ long walks to freedom. She spent time behind bars from 2010 to 2013 on trumped-up national security charges; during that time, she was honored with PEN America’s 2011 Freedom to Write Award, as well as the European Parliament’s 2012 Sakharov Prize. She was arrested again in June 2018 on ambiguous charges; five months into her sentence, she was charged in absentia on spurious charges of “propaganda against the state,” “assembly and collusion to act against national security,” “encouraging prostitution,” and “promoting immorality and indecency.” The severity of her punishments — 38 years in prison and 148 lashes — reflects a measure of the fear and the fragility of the state.
PEN America’s recently released Freedom to Write Index found that at least 238 writers and public intellectuals spent time in prison or were detained without charge for their writing during 2019. Iran ranked fourth in the Index, with 14 writers and intellectuals known to be behind bars. A significant proportion of these are women whose writings and advocacy, like Sotoudeh’s, focuses on improving women’s basic rights and dignity. However, Iran’s crackdown against expression is multifaceted, targeting a wide range of writers, journalists, academics, and creative artists whose work touches on political and economic themes, human rights, and religion. Altogether hundreds of political prisoners languish in Iranian state custody. Free expression was already under threat globally, but it is increasingly in jeopardy due to the pandemic.
Though concealed in Evin prison, and now with her hunger strike behind her, Sotoudeh’s spirit reflects the confidence, kindness, and humanity animating Iran’s women’s movement. In her letters to her children from prison, she reflects on what it means to be human. To her daughter, Mehraveh, then age 11, she wrote:
It was my desire to protect the rights of many, particularly the rights of my children and your future, that led me to represent such cases in court. I believe that the pain that our family and the families of my clients have had to endure over the past few years is not in vain. Justice arrives exactly at the time when most have given up hope.
Men and women of conscience everywhere — from prominent political leaders and creative artists to ordinary citizens — are joining the call to hear Nasrin’s voice and support her quest for justice. Let us all call on the Islamic Republic of Iran to end its systematic persecution of lawyers, activists, writers, and journalists for defending basic human rights. And let us demand the release of political prisoners as part of the humanitarian furloughs during the COVID pandemic.
Amir Soltani, a former board member of PEN America, is the author of Zahra’s Paradise. Dr. Karin Deutsch Karlekar is the Director of Free Expression at Risk Programs at PEN America.
