Shadi Sadr has helped Iranian women with free legal assistance and has started a campaign against stoning. She's been awarded one of the foremost Dutch human rights prizes, the Human Rights Defenders Tulip Award. But not before experiencing the regime's violence against women first-hand.
 
"They beat me and forced me to go with them", Shadi Sadr tells Dutch radio. She was detained last July in the wake of popular protests against president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and brought to the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. Her interrogators knew exactly who she was.
 
In 2004, Sadr had founded Raahi: an organisation for women in legal trouble. Because Iranian women have few rights and even less independent access to funds, they're often helpless in court. Raahi offered them free legal assistance, until the authorities closed it down.
 
Stoning
More recently, Sadr made even more enemies within the regime.
 
She began a campaign "to defend women who are sentenced to stoning", she says. Because the victims of this traditional - and in the eyes of many barbaric - form of punishment are almost never men.
 
When she was detained in July, her interrogators at Evin Prison accused her of being controlled by foreign powers out to overthrow president Ahmadinejad.
 
But unlike many of the protesters who'd taken to the streets the month before to demonstrate against the president's disputed re-election, Sadr was released after eleven days without being tortured.
 
Struggle
Since her release - thanks, she believes, to international pressure on Tehran - Shadi Sadr has been living in Germany.
 
The Dutch government has awarded her the Human Rights Defenders Tulip Award for her "extraordinary courage". But, she says, it's not just her struggle that's being recognized in this way.
 
She dedicates the award - which she received from Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen in The Hague - to "all the people in Iran who fight every day to get their rights." Despite the fact that the protests against the president's re-election were crushed, she remains optimistic.
 
"The gaps between the government and the people are increasing day by day", she says. "No government can survive such a gap for a long time, so either the government will solve the problem with the people. Or the people will solve the problem themselves."
 
Projects
The Human Rights Defenders Tulip Award comes with a stipend of 10,000 euros. In addition, it includes funding of up to 100,000 euros for projects proposed by the winner, to further promote her or his cause.