Parvin Ardalan: Photo by Arash Ashoorinia.
Haideh Daragahi interviews Parvin Ardalan.
Launched in August 2006, the One Million Signatures campaign is a courageous challenge to the repressive theocracy of Iran that now enforces a gender apartheid against its women. Iranian women’s rights activists aim to collect one million signatures in support of changing discriminatory laws against women. The campaign that has already received wide international support, is constantly under attack from the Iranian regime that sees women’s freedom as a political threat to its very existence.
One of the architects of this grass-roots movement is Parvin Ardalan — feminist activist and journalist. Ardalan, along with others, established Markaz-e farhangi-ye zanan (Women’s Cultural Centre), that has become a crucial instrument in crafting opinion, analysis and documentation on women issues in Iran. Since 2005, the Markaz has published Iran’s first online magazine on women’s rights, Zanestan, with Ardalan as its editor.
In 2007, Ardalan was sentenced to three years in prison by the Iranian regime for threatening national security. The same year, she was awarded the Olof Palme prize, for her struggle for equal rights for men and women in Iran.
“Despite persecution, threats and harassment, Parvin Ardaln has been persistent in her struggle and never compromised her ideals. Through constantly more ingenious methods, she and her fellow sisters have managed to increase the support for equal rights. The ongoing campaign for a million signatures against discrimination is an excellent example. Their intensive work deserves international recognition as a path to democracy and peace in this region of turbulence and conflict,” the Stockholm-based secretariat of Olof Palme Memorial Fund noted in a statement.
Parvin Ardalan was interviewed in Stockholm in January 2010.
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