Parvin Ardalan

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Parvin Ardalan, born 1967 in Tehran, is a leading Iranian women's rights activist, writer and journalist.^[1] She was awarded the Olof Palme Prize in 2007 for her struggle for equal rights for men and women in Iran.^[2] In the 1990s Ardalan, along with e.g. Noshin Ahmadi Khorasani, established the Women's Cultural Centre (Markaz-e Farhangi-ye Zanan), which since then has been a center for forming opinions, analyzing and documenting the women's issues in Iran.^[3] Since 2005 the organization has published Iran's first online magazine on women's rights, Zanestan, with Ardalan as its editor. In its constant struggle against censorship – the magazine comes back with a new name all the time – the newspaper has dealt with marriage, prostitution, education, AIDS, and violence against women.

Ardalan is one of the founding members of the One Million Signatures Campaign^[4], attempting to collect a million signatures for women's equal rights. As a part of the campaign she has taken part in protests that have been violently silenced. In 2007 she, together with Nooshing Ahmadi, was sentenced to three years in prison for "threatening the national security" with his struggle for women's rights. Afterwards four more women's rights activists have gotten the same sentence.