Human rights become a secondary concern, something to address after the hard security questions are settled.
In the shadow of high-stakes diplomacy between Washington and Tehran, tens of thousands of Iranians—among them Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, who survived suspected heart attacks in her prison cell—remain absent from the negotiations meant to shape their country's future. The pursuit of nuclear agreements and security arrangements has, as it so often does in history, displaced the question of human dignity to the margins of the conversation. What is called a grand bargain may prove to be no bargain at all if it leaves intact the machinery of repression that has claimed over two thousand lives through execution in a single year. Peace, to be worthy of the name, must account for those still held in the dark.
- Narges Mohammadi, one of the world's most recognized human rights defenders, suffered suspected heart attacks in an Iranian prison last month and remains under detention even as international negotiations proceed without her name on the agenda.
- Iran arrested more than fifty thousand people during 2025–2026 protests and executed at least 2,159 individuals in 2025 alone—a scale of repression that Western negotiators have largely set aside in favor of nuclear and security priorities.
- The Trump administration's 'grand bargain' with Tehran addresses weapons, sanctions, and the Strait of Hormuz, but contains no public commitment to the release of political prisoners or any halt to executions.
- Scholars and advocates warn that this exclusion follows a global pattern in which women, dissidents, and civil society voices are celebrated internationally yet locked out of the rooms where peace is actually made.
- Calls are mounting for Western powers to treat prisoner release, execution moratoriums, and women's political participation not as afterthoughts but as binding conditions of any sustainable agreement with Iran.
Narges Mohammadi is 54 years old, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and a prisoner. Last month she collapsed in a detention facility in northern Iran after what doctors believed were two heart attacks. After weeks of fighting simply to see a cardiologist, she was moved to a Tehran hospital and eventually transferred to her home under medical supervision and armed guard. She is alive—but she is not free.
For more than two decades, Mohammadi has documented Iran's use of execution as a tool of political control, exposed the practice of prolonged solitary confinement she calls 'white torture,' and gathered testimony from imprisoned women to build a record against the state's carceral system. She has been arrested at least thirteen times and is serving a sentence of more than forty years.
Yet as the Trump administration pursues what it describes as a grand bargain with Tehran—aimed at ending a months-long war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and halting Iran's nuclear program—her name has not appeared in any public discussion. The negotiations have centered on weapons, uranium enrichment, and sanctions. Human rights have been treated as peripheral.
The scale of what is being set aside is difficult to absorb. Iran arrested more than fifty thousand people during protests in late 2025 and early 2026—lawyers, doctors, students, children. Amnesty International documented 2,159 executions in Iran in 2025 alone, more than double the prior year. Since the war began, at least thirty-six people have been executed on politically motivated charges.
This is not an anomaly in the history of diplomacy. Women and civil society voices are routinely honored in the abstract and excluded in practice from the rooms where peace is negotiated. When Western governments speak of leverage, they tend to retreat into the language of pragmatism, treating human rights as something to address once the harder security questions are resolved.
But a settlement that leaves Iran's repressive apparatus untouched is not peace—it is a ceasefire paid for with the continued imprisonment of thousands. Advocates argue that any durable agreement must include the release of political prisoners, a moratorium on executions, guaranteed access to legal counsel, and meaningful participation for women and young Iranians in shaping their country's future. These are difficult demands. They are also the difference between a deal and a reckoning. True recognition of Mohammadi's work is not another award or a statement of concern—it is insisting that her struggle defines what any bargain with Iran must require.
Narges Mohammadi, a 54-year-old Iranian human rights defender, collapsed in prison last month with what doctors suspected were two heart attacks. She had been held in a facility in northern Iran, fighting for weeks just to see a cardiologist. When she finally received medical attention, authorities granted her a temporary reprieve from her sentence on heavy bail and moved her to a Tehran hospital. By mid-May, she was transferred to her home under medical supervision and armed guard. She is alive, but she remains a prisoner.
Mohammadi has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Sakharov Prize, the Olof Palme Prize, and major international awards for press freedom from PEN and UNESCO. For more than twenty years, she has documented how the Iranian state uses execution as an instrument of control, how it deploys torture and what she calls "white torture"—months or years of solitary confinement in a cell. She has exposed a system of gender apartheid that polices women's bodies and their speech. As a leader of the Defenders of Human Rights Center, an Iranian NGO, she interviewed imprisoned women, gathered their testimonies, and turned them into evidence against the carceral machinery that held them. She has been arrested at least thirteen times. She is serving more than forty years in prison.
Yet as the Trump administration negotiates what it calls a "grand bargain" with Tehran—a deal meant to end a nearly four-month war, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and compel Iran to abandon its nuclear program—Mohammadi's name has not surfaced in any public discussion. There is no indication that the United States has demanded her release. There is no commitment from Iran to free any political prisoners as part of the agreement. The conversation between Washington and Tehran has centered on weapons, uranium enrichment, sanctions, and deterrence. Human rights have been treated as peripheral.
The scale of what is being ignored is staggering. In response to mass street protests across Iran in late 2025 and early 2026, the regime arrested more than fifty thousand people—human rights defenders, lawyers, doctors, students, and children. Thousands more have been detained since the war began, many in secret facilities run by security agencies, where they are forced to confess to crimes. Amnesty International documented at least twenty-one hundred fifty-nine executions in Iran in 2025 alone, more than double the previous year's total. Since the war started, at least thirty-six people have been executed on politically motivated charges. Tens of thousands of Iranians have been arrested this year alone.
This pattern is not unique to Iran. Across the world, women like Mohammadi are celebrated as voices of freedom in their home countries, then systematically excluded from the rooms where peace is actually negotiated. United Nations data shows that women remain dramatically underrepresented as negotiators, mediators, and signatories in peace processes, despite decades of international commitment to gender equity in diplomacy. When Western governments claim to have leverage with authoritarian regimes, they retreat into the language of "balance" and "pragmatism." Human rights become a secondary concern, something to address after the hard security questions are settled.
But a peace deal that leaves Iran's machinery of repression intact is not peace—it is a ceasefire purchased at the expense of thousands of people still held in cells. A sustainable settlement would require more than security arrangements. It would demand that Iran release political prisoners, including Mohammadi, as a condition of any agreement. It would require commitments to end arbitrary arrests, establish a moratorium on executions, guarantee prisoners access to lawyers and fair trials, increase transparency about detention conditions, protect journalists, and ensure that women and young people have a meaningful voice in shaping Iran's political future. These demands will be difficult to extract from Tehran. But if Western negotiators can engineer complex sanctions regimes, they can find ways to make human rights non-negotiable in a deal that claims to be about peace.
True recognition of Mohammadi's work means more than another international award or a statement wishing her recovery. It means insisting that her fight—and the fight of thousands like her—defines what is acceptable in any bargain with Iran. It means ensuring that the people who have risked everything to document and resist repression have a seat at the table when their country's future is being decided.
Notable Quotes
The price of stability should not leave intact the carceral machinery that nearly killed Mohammadi and has killed many others over the years.— The author, on what sustainable peace requires
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why hasn't Mohammadi's case become central to these negotiations? She's a Nobel laureate. Surely that carries weight.
It does carry weight—in the abstract. She gets awards, statements of solidarity, international recognition. But when governments actually sit down to negotiate, they separate the symbolic from the strategic. Nuclear weapons, regional stability, trade routes—those are seen as concrete. A prisoner's life, even a famous one, gets filed under "human rights concerns," which means it gets addressed last, if at all.
But doesn't her imprisonment undermine the legitimacy of any peace deal? If you're negotiating with a government that's executing people for political reasons, aren't you endorsing that?
That's the uncomfortable question no one wants to answer directly. The answer is yes, implicitly. By negotiating without demanding prisoner releases, you're saying those executions are acceptable costs of stability. You're treating repression as a domestic Iranian matter, not a condition of the peace itself.
What would it actually take to make this non-negotiable?
Political will. The same ingenuity that goes into structuring sanctions could go into demanding releases. But it requires treating human rights not as a side issue to be raised politely, but as foundational to what "peace" even means. Right now, peace just means the guns stop. It doesn't mean the prisons empty.
And Mohammadi herself—what does she want from this?
She's documented for years exactly what she wants: an end to executions, an end to torture, an end to the system that nearly killed her. She's been saying it from inside a cell. The question is whether anyone negotiating on behalf of the Iranian people is actually listening to her.