The family of Jina Mahsa Amini, the posthumous winner of the 2023 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, has been prevented from leaving Iran to attend the award ceremony in France.
Hours before they were due to leave for France on Friday, the Amini family’s passports were confiscated at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport, preventing them from travelling to the European Parliament to receive the award on behalf of their late daughter.
The European Union announced on 19 October that Jina Mahsa Amini would be awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought together with the Jin Jiyan Azadi (Women’s Freedom of Life) movement. Jina Amini, whose death in the custody of Iran’s morality police sparked a huge wave of protests, is the second Kurdish woman to win the European Union’s top human rights prize. The first laureate was Leyla Zana, one of Turkey’s first Kurdish MPs, who was jailed in 1994 for adding a sentence in Kurdish while taking her parliamentary oath.
The Amini family have reportedly been subjected to intense surveillance and intimidation by the Iranian authorities since Jina’s death. Like other families who have lost loved ones in similar circumstances, the Aminis have experienced restrictions and harassment by the intelligence services.
This year’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought is set to be awarded on 12 December.