Iranian Nobel laureate says Mahsa Amini’s killing transformed society

 

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi said on Wednesday that Mahsa Jina Amini’s killing by the Islamic Republic inadvertently sparked one of the largest protest movements in Iran’s modern history and made “Woman, Life, Freedom” the shared language of a generation.

“Iranian society never returned to what it was before September 2022,” Ebadi said, adding that arrests, killings and other forms of state repression had failed to extinguish demands for freedom and equality or rebuild the “wall of fear.”

Ebadi said the January 2026 protests showed that neither public dissent nor the authorities’ bloodshed had subsided. She described the crackdown as the deadliest massacre in Iran’s contemporary history and said four years of organized repression had failed to force Iranian society into retreat.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202609162692