Shirin Ebadi

[Rasputin]

SHIRIN EBADI

The Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi was born in 1947. She received a law degree from the University of Tehran. In the years 1975-79 she served as president of the city court of Tehran, one the first female judges in Iran. After the revolution in 1979 she was forced to resign. She now works as a lawyer and also teaches at the University of Tehran.

Both in her research and as an activist, she is known for promoting peaceful, democratic solutions to serious problems in society. She takes an active part in the public debate and is well-known and admired by the general public in her country for her defence in court of victims of the conservative faction's attack on freedom of speech and political freedom.

Ebadi represents Reformed Islam, and argues for a new interpretation of Islamic law which is in harmony with vital human rights such as democracy, equality before the law, religious freedom and freedom of speech. As for religious freedom, it should be noted that Ebadi also includes the rights of members of the bahai community, which has had problems in Iran ever since its foundation.

Ebadi is an activist for refugee rights, as well as those of women and children. She is the founder and leader of the Association for Support of Children's Rights in Iran. Ebadi has written a number of academic books and articles focused on human rights. Among her books translated into English are The Rights of the Child. A Study of Legal Aspects of Children's Rights in Iran (Tehran, 1994), published with support from UNICEF, and History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran (New York, 2000).

As a lawyer, she has been involved in a number of controversial political cases. She was the attorney of the families of the writers and intellectuals who were victims of the serial murders in 1999-2000. She has worked actively - and successfully - to reveal the principals behind the attack on the students at Tehran University in 1999 where several students died. As a consequence, Ebadi has been imprisoned on numerous occasions.

With Islam as her starting point, Ebadi campaigns for peaceful solutions to social problems, and promotes new thinking on Islamic terms. She has displayed great personal courage as a lawyer defending individuals and groups who have fallen victim to a powerful political and legal system that is legitimized through an inhumane interpretation of Islam. Ebadi has shown her willingness and ability to cooperate with representatives of secular as well as religious views.

[Rasputin]

شیرین عبادی در روز 8 مارس امسال، روزی که نیروی انتظامی در پارک دانشجوبا خشونت با شرکت کنندگان رفتار کرد، در ایران نبود. او پس از بازگشت به ایران ضمن ابراز همبستگی با زنان حاضر در این برنامه و اعتراض به حرکت نیروی انتظامی دراین باره به زنستان گفت :

«وضعیت حقوقی زنان در ایران با وضعیت فرهنگی آنان همخوانی ندارد. بیش از 65 درصد از دانشجویان ایران دختر هستند و به عبارتی زنان ایرانی تحصیل کرده تر از مردان هستند. مهذا علیرغم وضعیت فرهنگی بالای زن ایرانی و با وجود آن که دولت ایران به میثاقهای بین المللی حقوق بشر پیوسته و متعهد اجرای آنها شده و مهمترین اصل در حقوق بشر، عدم تبعیض بر اساس جنسیت است، اما قوانین ایرانی متاسفانه حاوی نکات تبعیض آمیزی است. از جمله آن که شهادت دو زن در دادگاه معادل شهادت یک مرد است و یا این که اگراتومبیلی در خیابان با زن ومردی تصادف کند میزان خسارتی که به زن تعلق میگیرد نصف خسارتی است که طبق قانون به مرد میدهند و بسیاری قوانین نامناسب دیگر متناسب حقوق زن ایرانی نیست. بدین جهت جنبش فمینیستی ایران وسعت و عمق زیادی یافته است، این جنبش رهبری ندارد، اداره مرکزی و شعبی ندارد بلکه جایگاه آن در خانه هر ایرانی است که با تبعیض ناروا مخالف است.

روز 8 مارس که از طرف سازمان ملل متحد روز جهانی زن نامگذاری شده وارتباطی با هیچ کشور و هیچ مرام و مسلکی ندارد عده ای اززنان هموطن ما قصد داشتند در یکی از پارکهای عمومی شهر تهران گردهم آیند و سوته دلالانه این روز را گرامی دارند. حتی قبل از برگزاری چنین تجمعی به محض آنکه چند نفر از راه رسیدند نیروی انتظامی با خشونت زنان را متفرق ساخت و در این ارتباط حتی به پرآوازه ترین شاعر زن ایرانی یعنی خانم سیمین بهبهانی که درسنین کهولت به سر میبرند نیز رحم نکرد. استناد پلیس برای خشونت آن بود که چنین گردهمایی ای احتیاج به مجوز دارد و حال آنکه طبق قانون اساسی تجمعات مسالمت آمیزنیازمند هیچ اجازه و مجوزی نیست و اگر قرار بر این باشد که هرگونه گردهمایی با کسب اجازه قبلی صورت بگیرد باید بر این اعتقاد باشیم که اگر سه نفر هم در گوشه خیابان یا پارکی گردهم آیند مرتکب خلاف شده اند و حال آنکه میدانیم این استدلال درست نیست. طبق اصول حقوقی، شهروندان آزاد هستند که هرطور بخواهند عمل کرده و زندگی نمایند. مگر این که قانونی در موردی خاص این آزادی را از آنان سلب کرده باشد. در موضوع مورد بحث قانونی وجود ندارد و نمیتوان آزادیهای مشروع ملتی را موکول به موافقت مقامات دولتی کرد و از سوی دیگر بر فرض که چنین عملی نیازمند کسب موافقت از مقامات دولتی باشد ضمانت اجرای عدم کسب مجوز این نیست که پلیس با خشونت رفتار نماید. مانند آن که اگر رانندهای از چراغ قرمزعبورکند، رفتار پلیس با وی چگونه باید باشد؟ آیا باید او را جریمه کند یا این که وسط خیابان او را با خشونت از ماشین پیاده کرده و به ضرب و شتم وی پرداخته و مانع از ادامه مسیر او شود؟ کدامیک از این موارد وظیفه پلیس است؟ مسلما هر فردبیغرضی ولو آنکه به قانون نیز آشنا باشد به خوبی واقف است که فقط جریمه کردن در حیطه اختیارات پلیس است و بس.

به این ترتیب، ضمن اعلام تاسف از واقعه ای که روز 8 مارس در پارک دانشجو اتفاق افتاد و ضمن ابراز همبستگی با زنانی که در آن روز در پارک گردهم آمده بودند، به عنوان یک وکیل دادگستری اعلام میدارم خشونت نیروی انتظامی فاقد مجوز قانونی است و امیدوارم که احترام به قانون خصوصا قانون اساسی بیش از گذشته رواج یابد

[Rasputin]

Iran Nobel laureate faces death threats

TEHRAN,Iran's Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, long a thorn in the side of the clerical regime in Tehran, said she had received death threats from an extremist group.

"You have been warned several times about your declarations but despite that you are continuing with your actions," the group said in a fax sent to AFP by Ebadi, an outspoken human rights lawyer.

"We are warning you for the last time, if you continue you will pay for committing treason against your country and Islam," said the letter, signed by "The Association Hostile to Apostate Bahais."

Ebadi, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her work promoting women's and children's rights in Iran, said she has been on the receiving end of a number of death threats over the past few years.

The monotheist Bahai faith was founded in Iran in the 19th century but its practice is now barred in the Shiite Muslim nation.

[jahansh88]

that was YAHOO NEW's...isnt it,REDWINE????

[pora]

She's a muslim and nobel the price was biggest mistake for Nobel Foundation that gave to her

[Michellica]

I'm proud of her! she is the bravest woman in the world!

[pora]

I'm proud of her! she is the bravest woman in the world!

ببخشیدباید گفت زکی
خانم شیرین عبادی یک مسلمان است و مایع شرمساری تمام زنان دنیا
برای من زمانی خانم شیرین عبادی ارزش دارد که تغییر مذهب دهد
حالا چرا
برای اینکه خانم نمیتواند هم از حقوق بشر دم بزند و هم قوانین ضد بشری و زن ستیزی قرآن را لازم الاجرا بداند
شما که خانم عبادی را قهرمانش می کنید بمن بگوئید آیا یک زن چطوری قبول کند که علی امام اول شیعیان در خطبه 80 چنین بنویسد
خطبه 80 علی

مَعاشِرَ النَّاسِ، إ نَّ النِّسَاءَ نَواقِصُ الْإِيمَانِ، نَوَاقِصُ الْحُظُوظِ، نَوَاقِصُ الْعُقُولِ، فَاءَمّا نُقْصانُ إِيمانِهِنَّ فَقُعُودُهُنَّ عَنِ الصَّلاَةِ وَ الصِّيَامِ فِي اءَيَّامِ حَيْضِهِنَّ، وَ اءَمَّا نُقْصانُ عُقُولِهِنَّ فَشَهَادَةُ امْرَاءَتَيْنِ كَشَهَادَةِ الرَّجُلِ الْوَاحِدِ، وَ اءَمّا نُقْصانُ حُظُوظِهِنَّ فَمَوَارِيثُهُنَّ عَلَى الْاءَنْصَافِ مِنْ مَوَارِيثِ الرِّجالِ فَاتَّقُوا شِرارَ النِّسَاءِ، وَ كُونُوا مِنْ خِيارِهِنَّ عَلَى حَذَرٍ، وَ لا تُطِيعُوهُنَّ فِي الْمَعْرُوفِ حَتّى لا يَطْمَعْنَ فِي الْمُنْكَرِ.
اى مردم ، بدانيد كه زنان را ايمان ناقص است و بهره منديهايشان ناقص است و عقلهايشان ناقص است . اما ناقص بودن ايمانشان از آن روست كه در ايام حيض از خواندن نماز و گرفتن روزه معذورند و ناقص بودن عقلهايشان ، بدان دليل است كه شهادت دو زن برابر شهادت يك مرد است و نقصان بهره منديشان در اين است كه ميراث زنان نصف ميراث مردان است . از زنان بد بپرهيزيد و از زنان خوب حذر كنيد و كار نيك را به خاطر اطاعت از آنان انجام مدهيد، تا به كارهاى زشت طمع نكنند.

------------------------
برای این خطبه ودیگر نوشته زن ستیزانه قرآن لجن است که من خانم عبادی را قبول ندارم چون بعنوان یک زن درعین حال از قوانین زن ستیزانه اسلام دفاع می کند

[mahsaak]

از زبان خود عبادی بشنوید

ebadi says:

I was born in the city of Hamedan [northwestern Iran] in 1947. My family were academics and practising Muslims. At the time of my birth my father was the head of Hamedan's Registry Office. My father, Mohammad Ali Ebadi, one of the first lecturers in commercial law, had written several books. He passed away in 1993.

I spent my childhood in a family filled with kindness and affection. I have two sisters and a brother all of whom are highly educated. My mother dedicated all her time and devotion to our upbringing.

I came to Tehran with my family when I was a one year old and have since been a resident in the capital. I began my education at Firuzkuhi primary school and went on to Anoshiravn Dadgar and Reza Shah Kabir secondary schools for my higher education. I sat the Tehran University entrance exams and gained a place at the Faculty of Law in 1965. I received my law degree in three-and-a-half years, and immediately sat the entrance exams for the Department of Justice. After a six-month apprenticeship in adjudication, I began to serve officially as a judge in March 1969. While serving as a judge, I continued my education and obtained a doctorate with honours in private law from Tehran University in 1971.

I held a variety of positions in the Justice Department. In 1975, I became the President of Bench 24 of the [Tehran] City Court. I am the first woman in the history of Iranian justice to have served as a judge. Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution in February 1979, since the belief was that Islam forbids women to serve as judges, I and other female judges were dismissed from our posts and given clerical duties. They made me a clerk in the very court I once presided over. We all protested. As a result, they promoted all former female judges, including myself, to the position of "experts" in the Justice Department. I could not tolerate the situation any longer, and so put in a request for early retirement. My request was accepted. Since the Bar Association had remained closed for some time since the revolution and was being managed by the Judiciary, my application for practising law was turned down. I was, in effect, housebound for many years. Finally, in 1992 I succeeded in obtaining a lawyer's licence and set up my own practice.

I used my time of unemployment to write several books and had many articles published in Iranian journals. After receiving my lawyer's licence I accepted to defend many cases. Some were national cases. Among them, I represented the families of the serial murders victims (the family of Dariush and Parvaneh Foruhar) and Ezzat Ebrahiminejad, who were killed during the attack on the university dormitory. I also participated in some press-related cases. I took on a large number of social cases, too, including child abuse. Recently I agreed to represent the mother of Mrs Zahra Kazemi, a photojournalist killed in Iran.

I also teach at university. Each year, a number of students from outside Iran join my human rights training courses.

I am married. My husband is an electrical engineer. We have two daughters. One is 23 years old. She is studying for a doctorate in telecommunications at McGill University in Canada. The other is 20 years old and is in her third year at Tehran University where she reads law.

[mahsaak]

[Rasputin]

Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran, third from left, Jody Williams, of the United States, second from left, and fellow pose with Mavis Leno, left, Feminist Majority board member, and Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Tuesday, April 11, 2006, in Los Angeles. Williams and Ebadi along with two other Nobel laureates will be honored by Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Tuesday evening during the Feminist Majority Foundation's gala. (AP Photo/Ric Francis) (Ric Francis - AP)

Female Nobel Laureates Launch Peace Bid
By LINDA DEUTSCH
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 12, 2006

LOS ANGELES -- Shirin Ebadi remembers a time years ago when she was one of 100 female judges in Iran. She also recalls when the Islamic revolution changed everything.

"After the revolution, we were informed that women could not be judges anymore and women judges were demoted to administrative levels," she said in an interview Tuesday. "I became the clerk of the court in which I had been the judge. Of course, I couldn't tolerate that and I got early retirement."

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

The Iranian constitution of 1906, which established the modern constitutional monarchy, vested only symbolic power in the hands of the monarchy. Under the reign of Reza Shah, from 1926 to 1941, a wise dictator and nation builder who assumed total authority with a measure of popular support, the monarchy ran the country. But in 1941, after British and Russian forces occupied Iran during World War II, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate the throne in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The young shah presided over a period of relative political openness marked by a freer press, the balance of power shifted back toward elected government, with the parliament and its appointed prime minister taking control of the country's affairs as the constitution had intended. During Prime Minister Mossadegh's brief era, the shah exerted nominal influence, and until the coup d'état of 1953, it could be said the Iranian people were effectively governed by their elected representatives.

In 1951, next to the prime minister, the unloved thirty-two-year-old shah, heir to a newly minted, unpopular dynasty conceived of by a Persian Cossack army officer, appeared a green inferiority of little promise. The shah observed Mossadegh's rise with anxiety. In the expansive popular support for the prime minister, he confronted his own vulnerability as an unpopular monarch backed only by his generals, the United States, and Britain. The two Western powers were incensed by Mossadegh's nationalization of Iranian oil, but they bided their time before launching a response. In 1953, they concluded that circumstances were auspicious for his overthrow. Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, arrived in Tehran to reassure the skittish shah and direct the coup d'etat. With nearly a million dollars at his disposal, he paid crowds in poor south Tehran to march in protest and bribed newspaper editors to run spurious headlines of swelling anti-Mossadegh discontent. In a neat four days, the ailing, adored prime minister was hiding in a cellar and the venal young shah was restored to power, famously thanking Kermit Roosevelt: "I owe my throne to God, my people, my army, and to you." It was a profoundly humiliating moment for Iranians, who watched the United States intervene in their politics as if their country were some annexed backwater, its leader to be installed or deposed at the whim of an American president and his CIA advisers.

The shah ordered a military trial for Mossadegh, and newspapers ran front-page photos of the fallen prime minister entering the crowded courtroom, his gaunt frame and aquiline features more striking than ever. The judge handed down a death sentence but said he would reduce it to three years in prison, in tribute to the shah's superior mercy. For those three years, Mossadegh languished in a central Tehran prison; afterward, he retired to his village of Ahmadabad, to spend his retirement responding to letters from his devastated and still loyal supporters. In later years, his replies, penned in his subtle, lucid handwriting, appeared framed in the offices of Iran's leading opposition figures, those who would a quarter century later thrust the shah from power in the 1979 revolution.

Twelve years before the coup that interrupted both Iranian history and their lives, my parents met and married in the fashion typical for Iranians of their generation: through the traditional courtship ritual known as khastegari. On a bright spring afternoon in 1945, with the cool mountain breeze blowing across the ancient city of Hamadan, my father presented himself at my mother's family home to ask for her hand in marriage. They were distant relatives, and had met several months earlier at the home of a second cousin. The family received him in the formal sitting room reserved for company, and my mother served tea and shirini (the word means "sweets," and shares an origin with my name), peeking at my father's handsome profile while carefully pouring the cardamom-laced tea in the graceful manner long practiced for precisely this occasion. He fell deeply in love with her from the start, and to this day I have yet to see a man adore a woman more devotedly than he did my mother. Throughout their long lives, he addressed her reverentially as Minu khanum, adding the formal Persian word for "lady" after her name, as though he feared familiarity would diminish his regard. She called him Mohammad-Ali Khan.

[Rasputin]

When my mother was growing up, she dreamed of attending medical school and becoming a doctor. But before the day of the khastegari, the family roundly dismissed this possibility, on grounds that my mother scarcely had control over. As she entered adolescence, it escaped no one's notice that she was becoming a rather spectacular beauty. Had she been born a generation earlier, when it was unheard of for women to attend college, her luminous, fair skin and slender figure might have conferred some advantage in the only realm in which she could compete, the marriage bazaar. But for a young woman born in the late 1920s, a time when patriarchy was slowly loosening its grip on Iranian society and a few women were being admitted into universities, her good looks were a liability to any ambition greater than marriage.

She did not wear the veil, for her family was not so traditional as to insist that its girls cover their hair. But she did witness the banning of the hejab, as part of the modernization campaign launched by Reza Shah, who crowned himself king of Iran in 1926. Turning an expansive country of villages and peasants overnight into a centralized nation with railroads and a legal code was a complex task. Reza Shah believed it would be impossible without the participation of the country's women, and he set about emancipating them by banning the veil, the symbol of tradition's yoke. Reza Shah was the first, but not the last, Iranian ruler to act out a political agenda -- secular modernization, shrinking the clergy's influence -- on the frontier of women's bodies.

Circumstance and era conspired to keep my mother from a university education, but at least she ended up marrying a man as unpatriarchal as could be imagined, for his time. My father was serene by temperament, controlled his anger without fail, and could never be provoked into raising his voice. When upset or irritated, he paced the house with his hands behind him or methodically rolled a cigar, extracting tobacco from a silver case carefully, using the time to still his mind and raising his head only when he was fully composed.

He was born into a wealthy family, to a landowning father who served as a colonel in the military, in the late days of the Qajar dynasty, the monarchy that preceded Reza Shah's. My grandfather married a Qajar princess whom he loved dearly, but who could not bear him children. After painful years of trying, he finally relented to the insistence of his brothers and, with his wife's approval, acquired a second wife, Shahrbanu, who gave birth to my father and uncle. My grandfather passed away when my father was seven, leaving Shahrbanu alone with two children. The relatives fought over his will and eventually stripped the widowed Shahrbanu of much of his property and wealth. Indignant, she decided to fight back. She traveled to Qom, Iran's holiest city and home to the country's seminaries, hoping to find clerics who would help her secure custody of her children and the holdings that remained. With their assistance, she managed to keep her two sons, as well as assets enough to meet the family's basic needs. In those days, women's consciousness of their rights was limited to their intuitive sense of right and wrong; they would not have conceived of petitioning a legal system for redress, and instead appealed to influential men in society -- often clerics, seen as a resource for battling injustices large and small -- to advocate on their behalf.

I was born on June 21, 1947, the summer before we left Hamedan for Tehran. My childhood memories revolve around our home in the capital, on what was then called Shah Street (renamed, like most of the city's street, after the Islamic Revolution). The house was quite large, two stories tall and full of rooms, a veritable playground for my siblings and me. In the manner of old Iranian homes, it was built around a central courtyard garden full of roses and white lilies. There was a pool in the middle where a few silvery fish swam, and on summer evenings our beds were carried outside, so that we could fall asleep under the stars, the air perfumed with flowers and the night's silence filled with the chirping of crickets. My mother kept the house spotless -- clutter of any sort irritated her -- and in this she was assisted by our household staff. Many of my father's farmworkers from Hamedan had applied to serve at our house in Tehran. She entrusted each servant with a task; one did the shopping, another cooked, the third cleaned, and the fourth served tea and meals to guests.

My mother seemed to genuinely love my father, though their marriage had been essentially arranged, and had kept her from attending college. She would wait impatiently for his deep, booming voice to resound through the courtyard at the day's end. But after her marriage, she developed an extraordinarily anxious temperament. If we came home five minutes late, we would find her in the alley outside our house, frantic with fear that we had been kidnapped or run over by a car. The nervousness manifested itself in her physical health as well, and she was often ill, in and out of the care of doctors unable to fully treat or diagnose the source of her constant agitation. There was no obvious reason for it. By almost any account, she was a perfectly fortunate woman -- cared for by an ideal, loving husband, mother to obedient, healthy children, in relatively good social and financial standing. It would have been enough to make most Iranian women of her day content. But I can't recall a single day when my mother seemed truly happy.

[Rasputin]

As I grew older, my mother still groomed herself immaculately, still smiled quietly as she sat knitting in the shadiest corner of our spotless house, but the anxieties still raged inside her, and her body revolted with one illness after another. She was perpetually sick, and her attention to her failing health only fed her nervousness. For a while she came down with asthma, and she paced the house, complaining of feeling suffocated. When I was fourteen, my older sister married and moved back to Hamedan, leaving me the eldest child at home. My mother's poor health was the backdrop of our lives, and I constantly feared her death. I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling through the gauze of mosquito netting, worrying about my brother and sisters. What would happen to them if our mother died? Each night, I entreated God to keep her alive until my little brother and sister grew up. In my young mind, I thought that if she died I would have to quit school and take on her duties at home.

One day that year I crept up to the attic, to make a quiet appeal to God. Please, please keep my mother alive, I prayed, so I can stay in school. Suddenly, an indescribable feeling overtook me, starting in my stomach and spreading to my fingertips. In that stirring, I felt as though God was answering me. My sadness evaporated, and a strange euphoria shot through my heart. Since that moment, my faith in God has been unshakable. Before that day I had only said my prayers by rote, because I had been taught to say them, just I had been taught to wash my face before bed. But after that moment in the attic, I began to recite them with true belief. It is hard to describe the awakening of spirituality, just as it is difficult to explain to someone who has never fallen in love the emotional contours of that experience. My attic revelation reminds me of a line from a Persian poem, "Oh you, the stricken one / Love comes to you, it is not learned."

[Rasputin]