When the Nobel Prize Winner Is in Prison: Narges Mohammadi Joins a Short List

In the more than 120 years since the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded, it has been given only five times to individuals who were in prison when the announcement came.

The Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who was honored with the prize Friday, is the fifth. It’s not clear that Mohammadi is even aware of the news; if she is, she would have heard it from inside the walls of Iran’s Evin Prison.

Mohammadi joins a short list of laureates whose Nobel-winning work landed them behind bars; one of them, the Belarusian pro-democracy activist Ales Bialiatski, was honored last year. The others were the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (awarded the prize in 1935), the Burmese politician and activist Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), and the Chinese writer and activist Liu Xiaobo (2010).

In all these cases the Nobel committee has sought to shine light on both the cause and the plight of the individual, with an implicit hope that the honor might influence hard-line regimes and help win freedom for the laureates. 

But it hasn’t worked out that way. 

Ossietzky was a prescient journalist who wrote about Germany’s secret efforts to rearm in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He documented clandestine military expansion, and was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931.

Once the Nazis took power, Ossietzky was a vocal critic of the new regime and was rearrested and sent to a concentration camp. He was awarded the prize but forbidden from traveling to Norway to receive it. Ossietzky was tortured in several Nazi camps and died in a Berlin hospital in 1938. He was 48.

Suu Kyi is the only one of the five to have actually received her Nobel — after a 21-year wait. She won the peace prize for leading pro-democracy protests across her country (then known as Burma) in 1988 and 1989, and in the two decades that followed, her activism against a military regime landed her in prison on multiple occasions. 

Suu Kyi is also the only one of the five jailed Nobel laureates whose cause eventually won; she was freed and multiparty elections were held in 2010. In 2012, she traveled to Norway for a special ceremony to receive the Nobel. 

Since then, Suu Kyi has come under fire for a failure to speak out against the abuse of the Rohingya minority in her country, and more recently, she was jailed yet again by a military regime that took power in a 2021 coup.

In Liu Xiaobo’s case, the award itself not only failed to change Chinese policy; it caused fury within the leadership in Beijing and led to official diplomatic protests against Norway for having honored one of the most strident public opponents of the regime.

Liu had spent decades writing and speaking on behalf of greater democracy in China, dating to the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square.

He was serving his fourth prison term when he was awarded the 2010 Nobel - for a “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Liu was granted medical parole only when it was clear his health was failing him. He died only three weeks later, in July 2017 at age 61. 

As for Bialiatski, last year’s honoree, the postscript to his award hasn’t gone well. The man who co-founded the pro-democracy group Viasna in Belarus and helped lead political opposition to the regime had his jail time extended in March. He was given a 10-year sentence for financial crimes that rights groups have said were fabricated to keep him silent and behind bars. 

On Friday, the Nobel Committee said the prize for Mohammadi was “recognition of a whole movement” in Iran, and added its hope that the Iranian government would make “the right decision” and release Mohammadi so that she might receive her prize. 

The early indications aren’t encouraging. Iran’s official news agency said “the Westerners” had given Mohammadi the Nobel for “her actions against Iran’s national security.”