Authorities arrested campaign member Esha Momeni on October 15, and she is still being held in detention. Momeni is a dual American-Iranian citizen who traveled to Iran to visit family and complete her Master’s research on the Iranian women’s movement. Also last month, Iranian officials prevented campaign member Sussan Tahmasebi from traveling and confiscated campaign materials from the home of Parastoo Alahyaari.

The US magazine, Glamour, this week named the Nobel Women’s Initiative one of ten winners of their annual Women of the Year award. The magazine noted that since 2006 the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Shirin Ebadi, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Wangari Maathai, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Betty Williams and Jody Williams have used their “clout with world leaders to get them to take a stand against violence and work for peace and human rights”.

Glamour Magazine Announces 2008 Women of the Year on NBC's Today Show

The Iranian regime has stepped up its campaign against Shirin Ebadi – read more here.

Recently they have pressured Malaysia to silence the Nobel Peace Laureate.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative joins the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran together with the Asian NGOs Network on National Human Rights Institutions (ANNI) to call on the governments of Iran and Malaysia to support free speech—and for Malaysia not bow to pressure from Iran to silence Dr Shirin Ebadi.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative—founded by Dr. Ebadi and five of her sister Nobel Peace Laureates—condemns all accusations against Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi. The most recent incident involves accusations that her daughter converted to the Bahai faith, and appear to be related to Dr. Ebadi’s decision to defend in court seven members of the Bahai minority in Iran.

On August 8, 2008, a long article was published on the website of the official Iranian Republic News Agency (IRNA) and in the newspaper Jomhouri Eslami leveling a series of attacks against Dr. Ebadi and her family. This article followed a series of articles in other Iranian newspapers accusing Dr. Ebadi of various crimes against Islam and subversive acts against the state of Iran. She has publicly defended her right to legally represent members of the Bahai faith being persecuted in Iran. Dr. Ebadi and her family have also gone on record in the Iranian media, denying any family members’ conversion to the Bahai faith and underscoring their commitment to Islam.

The Nobel Women's Initiative continues to lend the strength of their prestige to support the Observatorios de la Transgresión Feminista/ Feminist Transformation Watch. The Nobel Women's Initiative issued the statement below in support of Nicaraguan feminist Dora María Tellez's hunger strike to protest and halt steps by President Daniel Ortega to rescind the legal status of the political party she co-founded, the MRS Party (Movimiento Renovación Sandinista).


Dora Maria Tellez “has emerged in the midst of the multitude that is not happy with the situation to demonstrate that liberty is a non negotiable and that in the face of injustice silence and passivity do not have a place.”
Nicaraguan poet and writer Gioconda Belli

On June 12, 2008, the Nobel Women’s Initiative expresses its solidarity with the women’s rights movement in Iran, which has identified this day as a national day of solidarity in objecting to laws that discriminate against women.

On this day three years ago, women's rights activists organized an unprecedented protest in front of Tehran University, demanding that laws which discriminate against women be revised. On June 12, 2006, Iranian women's rights activists took to the streets again and planned a similar protest in Haft-e Tir Square, in Tehran, with similar objectives and demands. The protest was violently broken up and over 70 persons arrested. This was the first major crackdown against peaceful women's activism in Iran.

After nine days in detention, Khadijeh Moghaddam, women's rights activist and member of Change for Equality's One Million Signatures Campaign, was finally released the afternoon of 16 April.
 
On 8 April, Moghaddam was arrested by Iranian security forces. The forces forcibly entered her home with charges of "spreading of propaganda against the state; disruption of public opinion; and actions against national security." Moghaddam was being detained at Vozara Detention Center, with bail set at 100 Million Tomans (approx. $110,000). She was transfered to Evin prison on 15 April, after her bail was reduced to a third party guarantee.

The Nobel Women's Initiative stands in solidarity with the Iranian women's rights movement. The brave efforts by the One Million Signatures Campaign to defend and advance women's rights in Iran must not be criminalized. We condemn any action by the Iranian authorities aimed at suppressing the women's rights movement. 

In February Parvin Ardalan was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for 2007 for succeeding in making the demand for equal rights for men and women a central part of the struggle for democracy in Iran. Since then the prominent activist has been summoned to court at least three times on various charges.

Ardalan was even barred from leaving Iran to travel to Sweden to accept the Olof Palme Prize. She had already boarded the plane when security agents removed her. Authorities confiscated her passport and a travel ban against her remains intact.

Ardalan is a journalist and one of the founding members of the One Million Signatures Campaign, which aims to collect 1 million signatures in support of changing Iran's discriminatory laws against women. In the past, she has been interrogated several times and detained as a result of her writings and activism.

On 6 March, Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire joined more than 50 female heads of state, ministers, heads of international organizations, business leaders and civil society activists in Brussels for "Women stabilizing an insecure world: An international conference for women political leaders." At the conference Maguire delivered a statement focusing on achieving security and women's empowerment through peace and nonviolence. She concluded, "With a passion for peace and absolute conviction that violence never works, nonviolence does, we can change the world."