Iranian women will overthrow the Islamic Republic even if it survives a war, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi said in a message marking the International Women's Day.
"I am convinced that if the Islamic Republic survives any war, it will not survive facing the women," Mohammadi said in the video message published on her social media accounts on Saturday.
"The glass of life of the authoritarian regime will be broken by the hands of women of Iran."
Mohammadi is the most outspoken and prominent dissident inside the country and has spent over a decade in Iranian prisons. Currently on medical leave from Tehran's Evin Prison, she has resumed her public criticism of Iran's theocratic rulers.
In her video message, she said the Islamic Republic has used all the possibilities and capacities of a political system to suppress, subjugate and dominate women over the past 46 years.
However, she said, "women overcame the government. Women of Iran were subjected to widespread discrimination, daily humiliation in their public and private life, but they were able to master and resist."
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate accused the Islamic Republic of subjecting Iranian women to gender apartheid.
"The Islamic Republic has wielded all its power from legislation in parliament to enforcement by the executive branch, from judiciary rulings to propaganda, education and cultural engineering, to subjugate women. It has used every tool at its disposal to dominate them. Yet today we witness the strength and defiance of women in Iranian society," she added.
On Thursday, a US-based rights group has urged governments to recognize what it called gender apartheid in Iran as a crime against humanity, arguing that the Islamic Republic systematically oppresses women.
"The oppression of women in Iran is not just discrimination—it is a deliberately designed, institutionalized system of domination intended to enforce the subjugation of women to maintain the state’s grip on power," said Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) director of communications, Bahar Ghandehari.
"This state-sanctioned systemic subjugation amounts to nothing less than gender apartheid, which fully meets the threshold of a crime against humanity," she added in the press release.
