TEHRAN: Award-winning Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh told AFP Sunday that she has been barred from practicing for three years and will hold a protest against the decision this week.

Sotoudeh was released from jail last year when halfway through a six-year sentence for “actions against national security and committing propaganda against the regime.”

She said the ban was a threat to the legal profession but she would not appeal. Instead, she will conduct a sit-down protest outside the Iran Bar Association’s headquarters in Tehran, starting Tuesday.

“The tribunal made this illegal decision at the demand of a court based at Evin Prison,” the Tehran jail where she served her sentence, Sotoudeh said by telephone.

“This ruling opens the way for the disqualification of other lawyers in the future,” she added.

Sotoudeh was released in September 2013 shortly before Iran’s then newly elected President Hassan Rouhani attended the UN General Assembly in New York.

A court last month authorized Sotoudeh, who won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov rights prize in 2012, to resume her practice.

She has defended journalists and rights activists including Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebad. When in jail she staged two hunger strikes, in protest at the conditions at Evin and on a ban against seeing her son and daughter.