By DPA,
Tehran : The Iranian judiciary has imposed a suspended jail term on women’s rights activist and 2007 Olaf Palme Prize-winner Parvin Ardalan, the Tehran press reported Saturday.
The feminist received a two-to-three year suspended jail term for staging an illegal demonstration in June 2006 in Tehran in favour of equal rights for Iranian women and hence harming national security, the Etemad neswspaper reported, without giving further details.
Ardalan, 41, was co-founder of the women’s cultural centre in the mid-1990s and initiated a plan to collect one million signatures in Iran to amend the prevailing law on women’s rights, which are not equal to those of men.
Ardalan won the 2007 Palme Prize but was prevented by local authorities from leaving for Sweden and receive it in person.
The prize, worth $75,000, was created 1987 in memory of late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, who was gunned down outside a Stockholm cinema in 1986.
She vowed not be intimidated by the ban and to keep the momentum in her struggle for women’s rights. Under Islamic laws, women have not the same rights as men on issues such as divorce, child custody and inheritance.