SHIRIN EBADI

Lawyer, Human Rights Activist, Nobel Laureate
Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm
Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Co-presented by UW’s Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series, with underwriting support from Reed, Longyear, Malnati & Ahrens, PLLC

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Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links

Biography

Shirin Ebadi
Lawyer, professor, and human rights champion Shirin Ebadi has worked for women’s rights and human rights for more than three decades. A graduate of Tehran University, Ebadi was the first female judge in her country, Iran, and served as president of Bench 24 of the Tehran city court beginning in 1975. With the advent of the Islamic republic in 1979, she was forced to resign her seat and was only allowed to clerk in the court she once presided over. Protesting this position, she and other female judges were promoted to the position of "experts" in the Justice Department. But Ebadi soon retired from the city court and only returned to law in 1992 when she was finally able to obtain a lawyer’s license and set up her own practice.

Since then, Ebadi has fought censorship, defended women’s rights, and has played a key role in the reform of family laws in Iran; she has sought changes in divorce and inheritance legislation, and defended women’s rights activists who were not finding representation elsewhere. She soon became famous for taking on the kind of politically sensitive cases many Iranian lawyers would not dream of touching, including the defense of two liberal intellectuals Daryoush and Parvaneh Forouhar, who were stabbed to death in a series of killings in 1998 which turned out to be the work of "rogue elements" in the Intelligence Ministry. In 2003, Ebadi became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her brave, intelligent fight for human rights. “Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death, but I have learned to overcome my fear,” she said in a 1999 interview.

Born in northwestern Iran in 1947, Ebadi is the author of numerous papers and articles for Iranian journals, and is the author of Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim her Life and Country (2007) and Refugee Rights in Iran (2008). Married with two college-age children, she continues to practice law in Tehran, despite continued resistance, regulations, and political unease. She is also a founder, with six other female Nobel winners, of the Women's Nobel Prize Initiative, a nonprofit based in Canada that works for women's rights internationally. She is also the founder one of the first independent, nongovernmental human rights organizations in Iran: The Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child.

Excerpt

Selected Works

Refugee Rights in Iran (2008)
Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim her Life and Country (2007)

Web Links