The regime told me: ‘Stop making all this noise outside Iran. Killing you would be easy’

Human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi is working from her London home with opposition leaders on a legal framework for a new Iran. But the exiled judge and Nobel laureate tells Chloe Hadjimatheou she fears Tehran still has her in its sights

- Chloe Hadjimatheou

Shirin Ebadi is someone who should have made Iran proud. She was her nation's first female judge and its first Nobel laureate. Instead, she spent years being hounded by the Islamic regime: it bugged her flat, sent her death threats and even set a honeytrap for her husband.

She was forced to leave, but 17 years after making London her home, the human rights lawyer is still not out of reach of the long arm of the regime. The police have cautioned her against allowing anyone but close friends into her home, so we meet online. The 78-year-old appears onscreen wearing a cheerful pink jumper and matching lipstick.

She has never been able to bear the idea of a bodyguard, instead choosing to rent offices and flats in secure high-rise buildings. Even there, however, she suspects that on at least one occasion an Iranian intelligence agent was renting the flat next door.

Last week, the Iranian opposition figure and son of the former shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, announced that Ebadi was working with him to oversee a committee that will prepare a legal framework for a new Iran.

In the past, Ebadi has insisted she is neither a monarchist nor a republican. "I am for Iran," she has said. But republicans have failed to come up with a leader behind whom they can coalesce, she says. The heir to Iran's monarchy, Pahlavi, she points out, is the person most of the opposition seems to be falling behind.

"His hands are not bloodstained. And he's promised that, once he returns to Iran, he will call a referendum and accept the vote of the people [if] it's for a republic rather than a monarchy."

And yet Ebadi admits that she was previously tricked into believing in promises of democracy. Back in 1979, as a lawyer in her 30s, she longed for the shah to fall and a new, freer government to take power. "While he was still in exile, Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini spoke about the rights of women and political freedoms. We were deceived," she recalls.