Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the recipient of the Nobel peace prize in 2003, says she is receiving an increasing number of death threats, the BBC reports:
They included notes pinned to the door of her office building in Tehran, warning her to “watch your tongue”.
Ms Ebadi, an outspoken critic of Iran’s leadership, said she had forwarded the threats to the chief of Iranian police. …
She has received death threats before, but in a statement on Monday, she said: “Threats against my life and security and those of my family, which began some time ago, have intensified.”
One of the anonymous, handwritten threats said: “Shirin Ebadi, your death is near.”
They warned her against making speeches abroad, and defending Iran’s minority Bahai community.
The death threats against Ebadi come almost a year after Iranian rights activists described the most “sweeping crackdown” against human rights and civil society activity in their country since the 1979 revolution, according to the Washington Post‘s Robin Wright, a crackdown that Wright reported includes “arrests, interrogations, intimidation and harassment of thousands of Iranians as well as purges of academics and new censorship codes for the media.”
