Malaysia has scrapped an invitation for Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to deliver a speech about Islam because of pressure from Iranian diplomats who warned the event could hurt bilateral ties, an official said yesterday.
Ebadi, who won the peace prize in 2003 for her work advocating greater rights for women and children in Iran, has often been at odds with her country’s hard-line government. Tehran has banned her Center for Protecting Human Rights in 2006, claiming it did not have a permit.
Ebadi had agreed to give a speech titled “Islam and Cultural Diversity” at Kuala Lumpur’s University of Malaya on Nov. 3, but the Malaysian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to organizers last month “strongly advising” them not to host her, an organizing official said.
A Foreign Ministry official in the department that sent the letter said he had no immediate comment. The official cannot be named because of ministry guidelines.
“We were told there would be big implications for bilateral relations,” the organizing official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Our hands were tied. The invitation for her to speak had to be withdrawn.”
Organizers were informed that the Iranian embassy had objected to the planned speech and “were pushing for Malaysia to call it off,” the organizing official said. They were also warned that Iranian university students living in Malaysia might hold protests in Ebadi’s presence.
The speech was supposed to kick off a series of talks in Malaysia and Thailand over the next few months initiated by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation. Other speakers will include US civil rights speaker Jesse Jackson and East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta.
Ebadi was among the first women judges in Iran, before being removed from her job after the Islamic revolution in 1979. She has since become an attorney and a human-rights activist.
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