Roya Toloui

Roya Toloui (; born May 22, 1966, in Baneh, Kurdistan province, Iran) is a prominent Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights activist and feminist She was born in Baneh in western Iran. She received her high school diploma at Baneh and her PhD in pathology from University of Mashad. Since 2006, she has lived in the United States.

Life She was the editor-in-chief of Rassan (Rising up), a Kurdish monthly magazine about women's issues. Three issues of the magazine were published in Sanandaj in spring and summer of 2005 until it was closed down in the summer of 2005 by the Iranian judiciary.

Following demonstrations in Kurdish inhabited areas of western Iran, she was arrested on 2 August 2005, and held in prison for 66 days until freed on bail in October 2005. Her case of imprisonment was highlighted in the International PEN's Day of the Imprisoned Writer in November 2005. After her release, she fled Iran for Turkey and finally she sought refuge in the United States in April 2006. In 2006, she received the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award.

In May 2007, Toloui was sentenced in her absence by the Iranian court to five years in prison for attending two peaceful protests in 2005 and one year for propaganda against the system.

In 2009, Toloui co-authored a chapter on repression and nonviolent resistance in the Iranian women’s movement in the edited volume Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East.