Iran’s Shirin Ebadi became the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel peace prize yesterday and sent a bold anti-war message to the west, accusing it of hiding behind the September 11 attacks to violate human rights.
Ebadi (56) a reformist lawyer, was handed the $1,4-million prize and a gold medal by the head of the Norwegian Nobel committee at a ceremony at Oslo city hall.
A tireless campaigner for women’s and children’s rights, she has challenged fundamental articles of Iranian law such as those saying a woman’s life is worth half that of a man or that a woman needs her husband’s permission to leave the country.
As a defence lawyer, Ebadi has earned a reputation for taking on cases others dared not touch. She insists human rights can go hand in hand with Islam and many exiled pro-reformists criticise her as too soft on Tehran, while Iranian hardliners call her a Western stooge.
Hailed as a hero among Iranian reformists and shunned by Tehran’s hardline clerics, she yesterday accused the US administration of ignoring UN resolutions in the Middle East yet using them as a pretext to go to war in Iraq.
”In the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of September 11 and the war on international terrorism as a pretext,” she said in her acceptance speech.
”Regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms … have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of the war on terrorism.”
Ebadi also pointed a finger at her own government, urging Tehran to accept that reform is inevitable.
”In fact, it is not so easy to rule over a people who are aware of their rights using traditional, patriarchal and paternalistic methods,” she said.
Iran’s hardline newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami lambasted Ebadi for appearing on television without a headscarf and for shaking hands with men. ”They gave this supposed Nobel prize to her to become a tool of foreign powers’ goals in Iran,” it said.
Ebadi became Iran’s first female judge before the 1979 Islamic revolution forced her to step aside in favour of men — in 2000, she was jailed as a result of one of her high-profile legal cases. – Guardian Unlimited Â