In 2018, when the Iranian government arrested more than 7,000 dissidents, attorney and activist Nasrin Sotoudeh was among them. For speaking out to champion the women of Iran, she was sentenced to 38 years in prison, following “148 lashes.”

It was the harshest sentence in that country in modern time,s and a clear effort to intimidate anyone else who might defend Iranian women’s rights.

Sotoudeh has a long history of being arrested since she was licensed to practice law in 2003. (She’d passed the bar in 1995 but was kept waiting that long for a license.) In those years, she was writing, editing, collecting information on women’s and children’s rights, and preparing legal arguments. With the license, she began defending abused children and mothers. And the arrests began.

In 2010 her office was raided and she was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement on charges of spreading propaganda and "conspiring to harm state security." The following year, she was sentenced to 11 years in prison; she was also barred from practicing law and from leaving the country.

Over the course of her imprisonment, Sotoudeh went on several hunger strikes. On one occasion, her husband reported her state: “Dizziness, impaired vision, unsteadiness in walking, and low pressure are alarming signs of deterioration, besides the extreme thinness.”

Sotoudeh was released in 2013, but five years later, after representing women who wanted to remove their hijabs (headscarves) in public, she was arrested yet again.

In 2019, her husband was arrested and given a six-year suspended prison sentence that can be enforced at any time. The crime? He posted updates on Facebook about his wife’s arrests. If the government decides to enforce the sentence, relatives will have to take in their two children.

In September 2020, Sotoudeh was hospitalized with heart complications and difficulty breathing; she tested positive for COVID-19. Iranian authorities responded by transferring her  to an even more crowded prison.

Human rights organizations are working to secure her release from prison.