Ebadi, Shirin (1947– )

Iranian lawyer and rights activist. Her outspoken campaigns for democracy and greater rights for Iranian women, children, and refugees have often brought her into conflict with ruling conservative clerics. She won the 2003 Nobel Prize for Peace for promoting human rights in Iran.

As a lawyer, she has been involved in a number of controversial political cases, such as representing the families of the Iranian writers and intellectuals who were victims of serial murders in 1999–2000, and working actively to reveal the principal figures behind an attack on the students at Tehran University in 1999 in which several students died. As a consequence, Ebadi has been imprisoned on numerous occasions.

She served as president of the city court of Tehran 1975–79, one of the first female judges in Iran. After the revolution in 1979 she was forced to resign, and has since worked as a lawyer and lecturer at the University of Tehran. Ebadi is the founder and leader of the Association for Support of Children's Rights in Iran, and has written a number of academic books and articles focused on human rights, including The Rights of the Child: A Study of Legal Aspects of Children's Rights in Iran (1994; translated into English 2000).