Jasmin Tabatabai, German-Iranian Actress and Musician
Düzen and I both see ourselves as sound amplifiers, something we’ve been doing for a year, but today we don’t really need to, because we’ve heard such great speeches, Mr Mayor, Mrs von der Leyen: fantastic speeches. Above all, we have had the real voices of women from Iran on stage, which we don’t have every day. This is so important and valuable. For weeks now the regime has been increasing the pressure on people. They are arresting pretty much everyone who has said anything in the last year, who has taken part in the protests, they are intimidating people, the brutality in the prisons has increased a lot. The regime is also trying to intimidate Iranians abroad, I saw a seven-minute video today where they say they have arrested three people from London, Berlin and America and they are going to try them in Iran. So it is all the more important, and I am very grateful, that you continue to focus on Iran with this evening, because this regime is used to killing and committing its crimes in secret. And I am grateful to everyone who is helping us to stop it. Because the message that Shima said earlier at the press conference, the message from us to the regime is: the days of silence are over. You can’t go on like this.

Düzen Tekkal, Journalist, Human Rights Activist, Founder HÁWAR.help
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî! It is important to emphasise again that the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî movement is alive. It is alive, and this has just been impressively demonstrated by Shima and also by Mersedeh, who are contemporary witnesses of dehumanisation, who lost their eyesight and yet were ready to die for this freedom, these are our role models. And the point is that the people in Iran who take to the streets are always fighting for an open society, not just for themselves. They are fighting for women’s rights, for universal human rights, and the men who accompanied these women and were executed for Jin, Jiyan and Azadî were also executed for open societies. Last year’s winner, Wladimir Klitschko, his enemies are also the enemies of the civilian population in Iran. The drone attacks endanger Europe and endanger the world. If we want this world to be a better place, then it is in our own interest to support this freedom movement in Iran. And we don’t have to be Iranian to show solidarity with what is happening in Iran. Jina Mahsa Amini was Kurdish, but it was the first time that the whole country, from Kurdistan to Tehran, rose up and said: We are all Jina Mahsa Amini. The slogan of the resistance movement Jin, Jiyan, Azadî first came to me as a Kurd, as a Yazidi, as a woman, as a war correspondent in 2014, when the brave women of Iraq defeated the IS murder gangs. And the IS murder gangs and the Islamic regime want to dehumanise. They are the opposite of women, of life, of freedom, and that is why they fear this movement so much. And that is why we stand together with them. And there is this Jin, Jiyan, Azadî effect, and it is precisely these flourishing platforms that cannot be taken for granted. And it is a matter of the heart for the people in Iran and for all those who have suffered disenfranchisement that, for example, someone like the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, takes the floor today and stands behind these people. It is also about the symbolic power of resistance and we will continue to support it as loudly as possible as a sound amplifier.