Opinion: The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize represents the genius of visionary women

Few documents in modern history speak more deeply to our fears and aspirations as human beings than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948. None have greater resonance in Iran today.

On Oct. 6, Berit Reis Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, breathed new life into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She declared that the Norwegian Nobel Committee had awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

“This year’s peace prize,” Andersen said, “also recognizes the hundreds of thousands of people who, in the preceding year, have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women.”

Iran’s women’s rights activists draw on the genius of visionary women who shaped the universal declaration, among them Eleanor Roosevelt from the United States, Hansa Mehta from India, Bertha Lutze of Brazil, Begum Shaista Ikramullah from Pakistan, Bodil Begtup of Denmark and Evdokia Uralova from the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. All these women made universality, equality and inclusion — the guarantee of equal rights to everyone — the bedrock of human rights.

Consider the power of the words enshrined in the very first sentence of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

Now contemplate a revision, or rather, a reversal of language, from all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights to all men are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

The freedom and equality, dignity and rights of half of humanity rested on the difference between the words “all men” and “all human beings.”

One formidable woman — Mehta — is widely credited to have stepped into the breach to propose changing the phrase “All men are born free and equal” to “All human beings are born free and equal.”

As Roosevelt noted, “one should never belittle the value of words, however, for they have a way of getting translated into facts, and therein lies the hope of our universal declaration.”

Almost 50 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea that women’s rights were human rights was embraced at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, in September 1995. The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action reaffirmed the fundamental principle that the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of human rights. 189 member states — including Iran — committed themselves to a roadmap for gender equality and women’s empowerment.

But only 20 years later, in 2015, then United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was warning of the emergence of “new forces threatening to curtail the rights of women and girls.”

The death of Jina Mahsa Amini exposed the truth of Ban’s warning. Amini was severely beaten at a reeducation center, and she fell into a coma and died on Sept. 16, 2022.

Roosevelt, of course, knew better than to trust in grand declarations by politicians. But she was not one to underestimate the power of concerted action. In the case of Iran, her question — “where do human rights begin?” — and her answer — “in small places close to home” has proven prophetic.

The scale, spread and spontaneity of the protests over the violation of Amini’s human rights took everyone by surprise. No one, least of all Iran’s supreme leader, our very own caliph, could have imagined the tipping of his turban — a feminist revolution in the heartland of Islamic fundamentalism. Our collective trauma, one masked as historical coma, is now manifest as awakening, a summoning of spirit, of art and love through a hail of batons and bullets.

The reason is simple. To Iranians, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a foreign abstraction or an alien imposition. Saadi’s famous poem “Bani Adam,” an ode to the oneness of humanity, the distilled genius of Iranian civilization, is not only inscribed on the walls of the United Nations but a living tradition that pulses through our protests as surely as it does in our poetry, religion and law.

There is no turning back the clock. Our coma is over.

Iran’s expulsion from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women on Dec. 14, 2022, was not only a testament to the rising power, presence and unity of women today but a tribute to the women — and men — at the United Nations who laid down the moral and legal foundations for resisting gender apartheid in 1948.

Sept. 16 is now the cradle for a new calendar. The anniversary of Amini’s death marks a civilization’s pivot around a unifying vision of life, with our bodies, homes, schools, streets, pavements, walls and even cemeteries and tombstones, and now the Nobel prize, as sites of translation where our faith in the dignity and rights of all human beings gets located as facts on the ground and truths in the heart.

“Woman, Life, Freedom” is not three separate words, categories or states. It is the creative instinct and shimmering humanity of the Iranian people, the promise of an Iranian renaissance — manifest in a single breath.

None of the Ayatollah’s ploys — not poisonings of school girls, not peace with Saudi Arabia nor proxy war with Israel — can wipe the power, protest and presence of women off Iran’s map. With women and girls shifting the very idea of the body politic, a constellation of artists and poets dare to imagine and inhabit a new map — an uncensored Iran where joy is the ultimate manifestation of justice.

Amir Soltani, a human rights activist, is the author of “Zahra’s Paradise.”