Nobel Peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi said today she had been summoned by Iran's hardline judiciary, risking arrest if she did not attend. "I have received a summons to a revolutionary court," she told the French news agency, AFP. The summons says Ebadi must present herself to courts within the next three days to explain herself, otherwise she would be arrested.Ebadi represented the family of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photographer murdered in custody in 2003, whose high-profile case has strained Iran-Canadian ties. During the trial of Kazemi's alleged killer last year, Ebadi accused the judiciary of covering up facts that implicated high-ranking government officials in the murder. Ebadi claimed that she had "no idea" as to why she had received the summons, stating that she would wait until the last moment to answer the judiciary. Ebadi was the first female judge in Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But she was stripped of her post when ruling clerics decided that women were by nature unsuitable for such responsibilities after the revolution.
