David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist, was arrested in Tehran on Sunday, October 29, just days after receiving the McCourtney Institute for Democracy’s 2023 Brown Democracy Medal.
According to The Guardian, Sotoudeh was arrested at the funeral for Amrita Garawand, a sixteen-year-old Iranian who died from injuries sustained for not wearing a headscarf on public transportation.
The Guardian also reports that Sotoudeh was arrested for not wearing a headscarf at Garawand’s funeral. Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, said she was “violently beaten” during the arrest.
Previously in March of 2019, as reported by CNN, Sotoudeh was arrested for advocating for the rights of women, children, and activists in Iran and sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Up until her recent arrest she was on medical furlough from jail.
In February of 2023, Sotoudeh told CNN that while a brutal state crackdown has succeeded in quieting the demonstrations that gripped the country for months, many Iranians still want regime change. In an exclusive interview from her home in Tehran, she told CNN's Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour that, "the protests have somewhat died down, but that doesn't mean that the people are no longer angry ... they constantly want and still want a regime change. They want a referendum."
As reported by CNN, Sotoudeh is renowned around the world for advocating for the rights of women, and activists in Iran, is currently on medical furlough from jail, after being sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes in March 2019.
Despite her arrests and the threat to her life, Sotoudeh believes that the protest movement must endure and will endure:
"Official authorities are trying to flex their muscles more, they're trying to show their strength a lot more than before, but civil disobedience continues and many women courageously take to the streets.”
The Brown Democracy Medal spotlights and honors the best work being done to advance democracy in the United States and internationally. Under the award program, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy recognizes practical innovations, such as new institutions, practices, technologies or organizations that advance the cause of democracy along with theoretical advances that enrich philosophical or empirical conceptions of democracy.
Sotoudeh’s recent award of the Brown Democracy Medal from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, marked the award's tenth year. Sotoudeh has dedicated her legal career to representing opposition activists in Iran, minors facing unfair sentences and women who protested Iran’s mandatory hijab law. Her clients have included Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi and pro-democracy activist Heshmat Tabarzadi.
“I am deeply touched by the love and kindness that’s behind the Brown Democracy Medal,” Sotoudeh said. “Those of us who are working for democracy in Iran are not doing anything that’s particularly exceptional or distinguished. What is exceptional are the obstacles we’re confronting in Iran.”
Sotoudeh is also a longtime opponent of the death penalty. She co-founded the organization Campaign for Step By Step Abolition of the Death Penalty in 2013 to advocate for legislation that would abolish capital punishment in Iran. In 2022, she received the Robert Badinter Award at the 8th World Congress Against the Death Penalty.
McCourtney Institute for Democracy Director Michael Berkman and Managing Director Chris Beem condemned Sotoudeh’s arrest.
“Just last week, The McCourtney Institute for Democracy celebrated Nasrin’s indefatigable commitment to human rights and the rule of law, as well as her astonishing courage in the face of government brutality,” Berkman said.
Beem added, “We call on people around the world to join us in renouncing Iran's oppression of its citizens, and to stand in solidarity with Nasrin and all those in Iran who fight for freedom and human dignity.”
Sotoudeh's powerful story is told in the documentary “Nasrin” produced by Jeff Kaufman and Marcia S. Ross and narrated by Academy Award winner Olivia Colman. The film can be viewed on Amazon Prime.
The documentary is an immersive portrait of Sotoudeh’s remarkable resilience in the work she does for the women’s rights movement in helping political prisoners.
With an original song by Tony Award-winning composers Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and performed by four-time Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo, the documentary was filmed in Iran by women and men who risked arrest to make this film.
Sotoudeh’s courage is truly remarkable.
Learn more about the documentary at nasinfilm.com
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.