EBADI, SHIRIN (born 21 June 1947), Iranian writer, lawyer, activist, and Nobel laureate. Ebadi was born in Hamadan, Iran, and grew up in Tehran. With encouragement from her family, she began studying law as a teenager and emerged as of Iran’s first female judges in 1970. Five years later, she became the first female president of the Tehran city court.
In the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, however, all female judges were dismissed from their posts. Ebadi spent the next decade writing and caring for her children. In 1992 she was finally able to open her own law practice, working on high-profile human-rights cases such as those of Zahra Kazemi, Bahni Yaghoub, Parvaneh Eskandari Foruhar, and Ezzat Ebrahim-Nejad, all of whom died under suspicious circumstances. In total, Ebadi and a team of twenty lawyers argued the cases of at least six thousand political prisoners and dissidents pro bono. While curtailing censorship laws, she also made efforts to reform child-custody and child-abuse laws.
In 1999 Ebadi was arrested for “disturbing public opinion” and spent twenty-five days in solitary confinement. After her release she was repeatedly threatened with rearrest and a potential ban on her ability to practice law.
Much to her astonishment, in 2003 Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After receiving the award she created the Center for Defenders of Human Rights, dedicated to supporting the families of political prisoners, but in 2008 the government forced it to close.
Mass protests in the wake of the likely rigged 2009 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to intense state repression of political dissidents. While Ebadi was out of the country, all of her belongings, including her Nobel medal, were seized, and some of her family members were arrested, blackmailed, and tortured. Ebadi has not returned to Iran since, choosing to live in exile in London. She has said that her decision was based not on fear but on the conviction that she could be more valuable to the struggle from abroad. In recent years she has spoken publicly in support of human-rights issues and the Iranian pro-democracy movement.