Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on Thursday said she was permanently barred from leaving Iran, in a birthday message to her teenage twins who she has not seen for over a decade.
Mohammadi, 53, had been in prison for over three years until her release in December last year for a limited period on medical leave.
Her legal team has warned she could be re-arrested and sent back to jail at any time, and she is not able to leave the country.
"I applied for a passport so I could come to you," she said in a message to her twin children, Kiana and Ali Rahmani, marking their 19th birthday.
But "the Islamic republic has issued and enforced two types of travel bans, including a 'permanent travel ban'," she said.
Kiana and Ali live in Paris with their father and her husband Taghi Rahmani, also a prominent Iranian activist who endured long spells in jail.
Mohammadi won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her two-decade fight for human rights in the Islamic republic and strongly backed the 2022-2023 protests sparked by the death in custody of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini.
The Iranian authorities "stamp the word 'permanent' on our documents, while they themselves live each day in fear of the fall that will inevitably come at the hands of the people of Iran", she said in the message.
It was not immediately clear when and under what circumstances the bans were issued.
Her two children received the Nobel prize in Oslo on her behalf in 2023, and she has now not seen for them 11 years.
Mohammadi, who was last arrested in November 2021, has spent much of the past decade behind bars.
She has remained defiant outside jail, refusing, in video conference appearances at international events, to wear the headscarf that is obligatory for all women in the Islamic republic.
Mohammadi has also regularly predicted the downfall of the clerical system that has ruled Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
