Shirin Ebadi

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, former judge, author and university lecturer, born in Hamadan in 1947. She graduated from the law faculty of the University of Tehran in 1968, entered the judiciary the following year and in 1975 became president of a branch of the Tehran City Court, one of the first women in Iran to hold such a post. After the 1979 revolution women judges were removed from the bench, she was reassigned to clerical work, and she was not licensed to practise law until 1992. She then took on cases for political prisoners, journalists and the families of murdered dissidents, and helped draft a child protection law passed in 2002. She co-founded the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child and the Defenders of Human Rights Center, and in 2003 she became the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She has lived in exile in London since 2009.