‘The Iranian regime holds all the cards’: children of jailed Nobel winner on learning to live without their mother

Ali and Kiana Rahmani, children of Narges Mohammadi, Iranian journalist, human rights campaigner and Nobel peace prize-winner, with their father, political activist Taghi Rahmani, at home in Paris. Photograph: Isabelle Eshraghi/Agence VU/The Guardian

Last December, just an hour or so after she stood on the world stage to accept the Nobel peace prize for her mother, Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, 17-year-old Kiana Rahmani found herself staring at the outline of a cell taped on the floor of the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

Part of an exhibition commemorating what the Nobel committee described as Mohammadi’s “fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”, the tape marked the dimensions of her mother’s isolation cell in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Roughly 2 metres by 3 metres, it was about the size of a car parking space.