1,700 Iranian doctors and specialists inside and outside the country signed a letter addressed to the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, backing the German foundation's decision to award its 2026 "Freedom Prize" to the people of Iran and its invitation to Prince Reza Pahlavi to receive it on behalf of the Iranian people. The statement was published on Tuesday, 13 October 2026, and delivered to the foundation together with the names of the signatories.
The letter was an initiative of a group called "Patriotic Physicians of Iran", and its text has been published on the website "We Take Iran Back". The signatories stressed that the prize honours the Iranian people's struggle for a free, secular and democratic Iran and, in their words, "the 'Freedom Prize' honours neither a dynasty nor an individual".
What the Iranian doctors' letter says
The signatories recalled in the letter that slogans and symbols associated with the Pahlavi family, including the Lion and Sun flag, have had a prominent place in protests inside Iran and in gatherings of Iranians abroad and cannot be ignored. They wrote that Prince Reza Pahlavi has opposed the Islamic Republic for nearly five decades and has always said that the future system of Iran will be chosen by the people in a free election.
The signatory doctors also backed the principles that Prince Reza Pahlavi has repeatedly stressed: Iran's territorial integrity, equal rights and individual freedoms for citizens, the separation of religion from government, and the right of the Iranian nation to determine its own constitution.
The 2026 Freedom Prize and the Frankfurt ceremony
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom announced on 15 September that it would award the 2026 Freedom Prize to the people of Iran and asked Prince Reza Pahlavi, as the best-known figure of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, to receive it in trust and on behalf of the Iranian people. The award ceremony is to be held on 7 November 2026 at St Paul's Church (Paulskirche) in Frankfurt.
Stefan Sebisch, chairman of the foundation's board, has said that the prize is deliberately awarded to the people of Iran and not to an individual, and honours the desire for freedom of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have risked their lives to remove the Islamic Republic. According to him, Prince Reza Pahlavi will hold the prize until the day it can be handed to the Iranian people's freely elected representatives. Bijan Djir-Sarai, foreign policy spokesman of Germany's Free Democratic Party, will give the laudatory speech at the ceremony. Since 2006 the Naumann Foundation has awarded the prize every two years in recognition of efforts for a free civil society.
In recent days Prince Reza Pahlavi had also spoken, at the Cyrus the Great Conference 2 in Toronto, of defections within the Islamic Republic's structure and the growth of opposition networks inside Iran; at the same time, political prisoners inside Iran congratulated Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi.
1,700 Iranian doctors called the 2026 Freedom Prize a recognition of the Iranian people's struggle for a free, secular and democratic Iran.
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