The international campaign to free political prisoner Narges Mohammadi won an important victory May 10 when authorities in Iran transferred her to a hospital in Tehran. They had refused to relocate her for 10 days despite her deteriorating health.
Mohammadi, winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, has been arrested 14 times since 1998 for her courageous opposition to the reactionary regime in Iran, speaking out against the death penalty, for freeing all political prisoners and for political rights.
She was rearrested Dec. 12, 2025, after addressing a memorial in Zanjan for human rights lawyer Khosrow Alikordi, who died under suspicious circumstances. Despite her well-known heart condition, plainclothes agents beat Mohammadi during her arrest. She was then denied adequate medical care in prison. In the face of growing international calls to get her urgent treatment, prison authorities sent her to the hospital in Zanjan, but her lawyers and family insisted she needed care she could only get with her own doctors in Tehran.
Mohammadi’s “temporary transfer is not enough,” said Taghi Rahmani, her husband, who lives in Paris. “Narges must never be returned to the conditions that broke her health.”
Mohammadi’s release boosts the fight to free all of the thousands of political prisoners in Iran.
The bourgeois clerical regime has been stepping up the use of the death penalty in the face of deepening opposition to its rule by working people and oppressed nationalities. “In the shadow of war, [the regime] has executed 23 political-security prisoners since the beginning of the year,” said the “No to Execution Tuesdays” campaign in a May 12 statement. It organizes weekly hunger strikes by political prisoners.
Fearful that funerals could turn into mass protests against the regime’s brutal assaults, prison authorities have refused to turn many of the bodies of those it executes over to their families.
Kurds, Baluchis and other oppressed nationalities are disproportionately victims of the death penalty. Among those facing execution are at least 21 Baluchis, who authorities accuse of “corruption on earth” and “membership in opposition groups.”
All of these prisoners “have been tried through unfair and opaque judicial processes,” said the May 12 statement. Forced confessions extracted through torture are common.
“We call for the abolition of the death penalty from the country’s criminal laws in general,” said three Islamic student groups at the University of Tehran in a May 10 statement. Amid the “horrifying” step-up in executions of political prisoners in the wake of the war, “we demand the immediate halt of executions connected to the recent protests.”