Prominent women's rights activist, Parvin Ardalan who was planning to travel to Sweden on ‎Monday morning to receive the prestigious Olof Palme Prize, was barred from exiting Iran ‎minutes before the Air France plane was set to take off at the airport. ‎

The Olof Palme Foundation announced on 25 Bahman [February 14] that it will award its prize ‎for 2007 to Parvin Ardalan, a women's rights activist in Iran and founding member of the One ‎Million Signatures Campaign to Change Discriminatory Laws. Ardalan was heading to ‎Stockholm to receive her prize on Monday morning. She had passed through airport security and ‎boarding gates and had boarded her plane. However, security agents at that time intervened, ‎forcing her to get off the plane, while confiscating her passport. ‎

She told the website Change4Equality: "I did not have a travel ban, and during the passport ‎check I was not told as such. But after I boarded the plane, they announced my name and airport ‎security officials boarded the plane. They told Air France officials that I was banned from ‎traveling and that I could not exit Iran." ‎

According to Ardalan, her passport was confiscated and she was given a court order to turn ‎herself in to the security branch of the passport office (under the president's office) in the coming ‎days. ‎