Human rights: an imprisoned Iranian lawyer distinguished by European bars


Amirsalar Davoudi, an imprisoned Iranian lawyer, is the winner this year of the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, awarded this Friday, September 23 in Bordeaux, we learned from the organization.

The Warsaw Bar is named for its part “bar of the year» by this jury made up of representatives of around ten European bar associations and lawyers’ associations.

Amirsalar Davoudi, who has acted as a lawyer for many human rights defenders before Iranian courts, and hosted a Telegram group for Iranian lawyers, was arrested at the end of 2018 for, in particular, insulting the Supreme Leader and propaganda against the ‘State. He was sentenced to a total of thirty years in prison and 111 lashes.

Released last June for irregularities, he was reincarcerated thirteen days later to serve a ten-year sentence in Evin prison in Tehran, where he is still. In 2018, the Ludovic-Trarieux prize had already gone to an Iranian lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh.

“Judicial Harassment”

By once again awarding the prize to an Iranian lawyer, hit by real judicial harassment and imprisoned for several years, the jury wanted to underline that the forces of democracy and human rights defenders were falling asleep in the face of the ever-renewed threat from Iran, and the fate reserved for its lawyers“, told AFP Me Bertrand Favreau, creator of the prize and president of the jury.

Amirsalar Davoudi is singled out as at least 17 people have been killed in recent days in Iran in protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, arrested on September 13 in Tehran for “wearing inappropriate clothingby the morality police, responsible for enforcing the dress code of the Islamic Republic. The jury also awarded the prize for the bar of the year to that of Warsaw “for his defense of the independence of magistrates while the Polish government puts them under the yoke“.

This year, the European Commission and EU finance ministers made the disbursement to Poland of funds linked to the post-Covid economic recovery plan conditional on reforms in the independence of the judiciary, requirements deemed insufficient. by the four main European organizations of magistrates.

This was the 27th edition of the Ludovic-Trarieux Prize, named after the founding lawyer of the League of Human Rights in 1898. This prize, whose first winner in 1985 was Nelson Mandela, aims to reward each year a lawyer who illustrated “through his work, his activity or his suffering, the defense of respect for human rights“.

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