Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saka. My guest today has a political

career which can be interpreted in different ways. To the fiercest critics of Iran's Islamic regime

in the West, Masame Ebtikar will always be associated with the Iranian student radicals who invaded the U.S. embassy in late

1979 and who occupied the building, holding U.S. diplomats hostage for more than a year.

Ebtikar, a student with excellent English, thanks to six years of her childhood spent in the U.S.

while her father was studying there, was a spokeswoman for the

student activists. But the political path she has followed since has not been hard line in terms of

Iran's revolutionary politics. Under the reformist presidency of Mohamed Khatami in the early 2000s,

she became Iran's first female vice president.

She's been a minister for education and in the four years up to 2021, she was vice president

for women and family affairs. She's consistently associated herself with more moderate

and pragmatic movements within Iranian politics.

Now, of course, Iran is under unprecedented pressure, facing an Israeli government, which since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, has gone on the offensive against Tehran's regional allies and proxy forces.

Israel and Iran have even traded direct blows

and remain perilously close to all-out war. And on the home front, internal discontent continues

to simmer as many women demand an end to what they call gender apartheid and widespread economic misery fuels popular discontent.

Amid clear signs of social and economic unrest is today's Iranian leadership in danger of losing

its grip. Well, Masomee Abtikar joins me now on the line from Tehran.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you.

Madam Ebtikar, as a former vice president for women in Iran,

are you ashamed of what the Iranian state is doing to your country's women today?

...