Powerful speech by former Iranian political prisoner and torture victim Marina Nemat at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, on February 19, 2013. Born in 1965, she talks about her harrowing experience as a young Christian girl living in Tehran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
She tells of how the overwhelming majority of Iranians voted for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamic Republic because he promised freedom and democracy. We all know how that turned out. Starting in 1980 young people began demonstrating, and in 1981 the mass arrests began. Nemat also took to the streets joining many other teenagers (some as young as 14), to protest against the Islamic Republic "because it did not deliver the freedoms that it had promised." Arrested in 1982, at the age of 16, she was taken to the notorious Evin prison where she was interrogated, tortured, and eventually sentenced to death. She remained there for two years, 2 months and 12 days. The only reason she was spared death was because one of her interrogators took a fancy to her and forced her to convert and marry him after threatening to arrest her parents.
It's only gotten worse.
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