Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has been transferred to a hospital in Tehran. After two heart attacks in prison - March 2026 and 1 May 2026 - the authorities are admitting they can no longer keep her in the same cell without it becoming too visible. A temporary suspension of her prison sentence, in exchange for a substantial bail.

According to her family's foundation, her condition is critical. She has lost 20 kilograms in prison. She has spikes and crashes in blood pressure, severe headaches, vertigo, nausea, double vision. She has a history of pulmonary embolism. Her family says she sometimes has trouble speaking. She was transported by ambulance to the „Pars" hospital in Tehran.

Mohammadi is 54 years old. In February of this year she received a new 7.5 years of prison sentence - not for criminal acts, but for her speeches at commemorations of the death of Mahsa Amini and the young women killed during the 2022 protests. Cumulatively, across 14 arrests in her career, her sentence runs over 44 years.

Everything she has endured in prison - isolation, repeated interrogations, physical abuse, medical neglect - she has documented. The records were smuggled out by fellow inmates, by visitors, at risk to their own lives. They were rewritten multiple times after guards found and destroyed them. Her memoir, titled „A Woman Never Stops Fighting", is set for publication in September.

For the world, her story is a testament to what peaceful activism against state repression looks like. For the Balkans, it is a reminder that our own freedom - the one we take for granted - is the result of 50 to 100 years of struggle, and that right now that struggle is being led by women in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Tibet. Their fight is our fight too, if we are honest with ourselves. Peace isn't static. It is active maintenance.

A question for those reading this with a coffee in hand: what are we doing for Narges Mohammadi? When her next heart attack hits - if she survives it - will we remember her as a Nobel laureate, or will her name be gone from us within a week? The imagination of freedom begins with remembering those who paid for it in blood. And right now, in Tehran, one 54-year-old woman is doing it for us.