Exclusive: the human rights lawyer, temporarily released from jail on medical grounds, describes her love for her family, and why she keeps going despite brutal treatment at the hands of the regime
Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and her husband Reza Khandan hold up a protest badge that reads: ‘I oppose the mandatory hijab.’Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and her husband Reza Khandan hold up a protest badge that reads: ‘I oppose the mandatory hijab.’
“That’s when I remember being a child and going to an amusement park and going into the tunnel of death and you would scream; that childhood nightmare has turned into an adulthood nightmare – that is how living for me feels like – living in that dark tunnel of death.‘If you force us to wear this half-metre of cloth, you will be able to do whatever you want to us’: Nasrin Sotoudeh at home in Tehran, September 2013.
“We all went in without the hijab and came out without the hijab. I didn’t even have a scarf with me, and that was amazing. I was already arrested – what were they going to do?” she says. She has been asked on numerous occasions why she risks her family life, and her answer is the same: she can fight for what she believes in and be a mother. “People say life is precious, don’t sacrifice your family life, but human rights and freedom are also valuable and precious. So instead of sacrificing one for the other I balance them when I can.”
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