The Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi talks to David Batty about the regime’s abuse of its population - and how the west needs to abandon the threat of war if it wants to win over Iran’s people and bring change

David Batty
guardian.co.uk, Friday June 13 2008

Shirin Ebadi at a media forum in Germany this month. Photograph: Felix Heyder/EPA

The Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi is not a woman easily stopped in her tracks - she has been held in jail and faced repeated death threats, but continues to speak out against the abuses of the theocratic regime. On the doorstep of the BBC’s Bush House in central London, though, an American tourist waves the Nobel peace laureate and her entourage aside, complaining loudly: “Do you mind? We’re trying to take a picture!”

It serves, perhaps, as a reminder for Ebadi - who has spent the day being treated like a VIP by the BBC World Service - of the challenge she faces in attracting western interest to her cause.

With the international community fixated on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Ebadi says there is dwindling scrutiny of human rights in her homeland, and the hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has taken advantage of this to increase repression.

“Since the world started focusing on the nuclear programme, the human rights situation in Iran has worsened every day,” says Ebadi, who won the Nobel prize in 2003.

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