Redefining diversity

Writing about ‘diversity’ seems to be a right of passage for all new bloggers and here I plant my sapling at the forest’s edge.

Diversity is a word I can’t help shaking my head at. Of all the words in the lexicon of political correctness, diversity is the one that’s most surreptitiously infiltrated our day-to-day speak. It’s become a buzz-word used by recruiters and politicians to avoid having to explain what they really mean and how much they mean it. In the age of sound bites and twitter, no word is more expedient than diversity.

But to speak of diversity is to speak of very little. We can’t talk about diversity as an ideal because it lacks a concrete definition. When considering diversity in the abstract we know we’re talking about equality but we’re also talking about representation and inclusion and tolerance and access and so on. It’s a term we’ve lazily come to accept encompasses many, sometimes conflicting, aims.

We need to be clear about what we mean because an all-encompassing definition isn’t conducive to effective advocacy and policy reform. Clarity and priority are the ends served by doing away with speaking of diversity all together.

When seeking clarity, we can’t complacently conclude that diverse is just another word for different. If we understand diversity to be a concept its definition must be accordingly abstract. Taking diversity to mean a range of perspectives or skills may be a statement of the obvious but more than this, it’s a non-contentious foundation on which more substantive discussions, about representation or tolerance for example, can take place.

We must also distinguish cases where change is merely desirable from where it’s necessary. The legal profession is an area in which the diversity monster regularly rears its head. Putting all her judicial weight behind the diversity drive is Baroness Hale. I once asked her what she understood diversity to mean and whether the Supreme Court was really lacking in it. Her answer was startling: she complained that it was embarrassing that there is only one female on the Supreme Court bench. The lack of any more substantive argument was conspicuous by its absence.

Reckless recourse to ‘diversity’ risks branding the profession sexist if not backward. Surely Baroness Hale doesn’t simply want more colour and spice on the bench? Of utmost importance is that the most qualified people are in place to interpret and enforce our laws and men and women can do this equally well. What Baroness Hale is right to criticise is the failure of the profession to adapt to allow women to work and be mothers. But what she means here is not diversity but access and this failure to modernise is much more than just embarrassing. More access for women to the bar is necessary. A more representative bench is merely desirable. This is a distinction Lady Hale, and the blunt language of diversity, fails to recognise.

Ram Mashru

India’s democracy: beginning to ask the right questions

Intelligence Squared is soon going to hold a debate with the motion ‘Democracy is India’s Achilles heel’. A sentence in the blurb reveals the debate’s facile focus: ‘A country that is striving to be an economic powerhouse is being pulled down by its political system’.

The debate is typical of the enquiries ‘the West’ make of India and the efficacy of her political system. But such narrow discussions contain glaring omissions.  If we want to take measure of India’s democratic failings we must look at domestic and not economic policy.

Whenever domestic policies are discussed, the discussions are more often than not shamefully complacent. A recent parliamentary debate on ‘Human rights in the Indian-subcontinent’ serves as but one example. In the debate Barry Gardiner, the MP and chair of The Labour Friends of India, set out to remind ‘the world’ that India continues to be a ‘beacon of tolerance, peace and democracy’ in the face of ‘some of the most serious security threats faced by any country in the world’. It’s true that India suffers regular and devastating attacks on its soil from terrorist groups that fly under many banners but it’s laughable to describe India’s response to these threats as ‘tolerant’. How could Parliament not know of the allegations of torture, arbitrary arrest and extra-judicial imprisonment leveled against India’s government?

The debate was a waste of parliamentary time for another reason. It set out to celebrate India’s commitment to human rights whilst condemning India’s ‘unstable’ and ‘dangerous’ neighbours. To praise India whilst criticizing Burma and Pakistan, among others, not only defies the facts but betrays a prejudice. The UK and India share a great trade and defense relationship, one highlighted by the very successful corporate delegation Cameron led to India last year. Who are The Labour Friends of India to complicate this lucrative dialogue with talk of India’s rights violations?

The complacency of ‘the West’ is matched by the apathy of India’s politicians. Sonia Gandhi, a pariah figure among India’s political classes, has defied the currents of the nation’s political and corporate mood by warning that the cost of India’s ruthless economic drive is the ‘shrinking’ of the country’s ‘moral universe’. Sonia Gandhi’s words, powerful as they may be, will only be met with a cynical reception. It is a shame that there is not a more popular or respected voice speaking out about the harm caused by India’s economic pursuits.

The greatest failings of India’s policy efforts are domestic. Internal security, poverty and health and human rights are all areas in which India’s democracy has proved to be a greater Achilles heel.

Security

India is a nation fighting a war on two fronts. She is subject to regular attacks by foreign terrorists and home-grown militants; a combined threat posed by Islamist extremists, Maoist insurgents and Kashmiri separatists. Dr Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, has described the Maoist insurgency as the greatest internal security threat to face India since the country gained independence in 1947.

The Maoists who occupy the ‘Maoist corridor’, a region spanning central India, have a single aim: the overthrow of the Indian government by 2025. Arundhati Roy, the novelist turned polemicist who documents her stay with the Maoists in ‘Broken Republic’, concedes that no government can negotiate effectively with a group intent on their destruction. But she argues that better governance would extinguish many of the flames around which the Maoists rally. Instead, the government has chosen to fight fire with fire. In Chhattisgarh, the state most affected by the Maoist insurgency, the local government has formed a vigilante army of teenagers to fight the Maoist’s child soldiers.

The silent but persistent threat of the guerrilla war is contrasted by the inconsistent and tragic acts of terrorism by religious fundamentalists. Mumbai suffered yet another terrorist attack in July of this year but the emotion that characterised Mumbai’s response was not grief or revenge but anger. And this anger was directed in equally against the fanatic murderers and the city’s administration, who many felt had failed to take effective steps to secure the city since the attacks on the Taj Hotel in 2008. A day after the Mumbai attacks Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Gandhi political dynasty, remarked flippantly that it is ‘very difficult to stop every attack’ and that ‘one or two…will get through’. This sort of political misjudgment has reinforced public accusations of the ineptness and apathy of India’s government. Many felt that political corruption and lack of concern were to blame for the lack of intelligence and for the failure to mount an effective security response. The disaffection entrenched by persistent security failings was encapsulated by the Times of India who reported on their front page, ‘Our politicians fiddle as innocents die’.

Health and Poverty

The plight of most Indians is ignored by discussions of India’s unrealised economic potential. Manmohan Singh described malnutrition in India as the country’s ‘blackest mark’ whilst Syeda Hameed, a member of India’s Planning Commission, conceded that India is worse than Bangladesh and Pakistan in terms of a failure to provide basic nourishment. India’s Family Health Survey reported that just under 46% of children under three, amounting to roughly 80 million, are undernourished. This number is made more shocking by the fact that the current percentage represents a mere 1% improvement after seven years. UNICEF reports that 2.1 million children die annually in India before the age of 5 primarily as a result of malnutrition. But this risk of death is increased by the lack of health facilities and proper hygiene.

The stark failure of the government to act effectively is highlighted further by the country’s poverty figures. In times when India’s economy is growing by around 8%, more than 800 million Indians continue live on under $2 a day.

Human rights violations

The torture scenes of Slumdog Millionaire were not a fiction and the practice of ‘reclaiming’ the lands of subsistence farmers for infrastructure projects without compensation is widely documented. Yet the international community seem both blind and deaf to allegations of torture and land theft perpetrated by the Indian government.

WikiLeaks revealed that in 2005 the Red Cross briefed US diplomats in Delhi about the use of electrocution, beatings and sexual humiliation against hundreds of military detainees. One cable reports that the US embassy in Delhi heard from the Red Cross that the Indian government had not acted to halt the ‘continued ill-treatment of detainees’. The Red Cross are said to have concluded that the Indian government ‘condones torture’ and that the victims of torture were routinely killed.

The ‘reclamation’ of land is a programme of rights infringement, which the government seem to be less, concerned about hiding. As demands for iron ore and coal increase, so has the rate of displacement. Ramachandra Guha, a historian, has compared the treatment by India of its tribal groups to the persecution of Australia’s aboriginal population. The sole distinction he draws is that in India, things appear to be getting worse.

The sentiment that India’s ruthless economic progress victimizes the poor was expressed by India’s, normally conservative Supreme Court, which remarked that ‘every step [taken] seems to give rise to insurgency and political extremism’. The Supreme Court went further to observe that ‘development’ has become, for millions of Indians, ‘a dreadful and hated word’. The Court made these remarks in a case concerning the acquisition of land by a company that had failed to compensate its tribal owner for 23 years.

Conclusion

A recent article in the FT described India as a ‘land of paradox’. It cited an 8% growth rate and a growing, consumerist middle class and compared it with figures that in some Indian states, the number of those living in poverty or suffering from malnutrition exceed the numbers in sub-Saharan Africa. This ‘central contradiction’ seems to reflect John Galbraith’s economic model that ‘”if you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the sparrows”. But this is a political and policy strategy that is, evidently, failing.

The inadvertent success of the recent resurgence in the anti-graft campaign and Anna Hazare’s hunger strike was the exposure of the extent of corruption in India’s political system. A necessary outcome of this exposure must be that the international community take a more critical stance towards India’s political and domestic failings. A discussion on India’s democracy without any consideration of India’s domestic policy failings is frankly a debate not worth having.

Ram Mashru

Related articles

• Anger rises in India over redrawn poverty line (cnn.com)
• You: Maoists fanning into Indian cities (nation.com.pk)

Responding to the riots: actions don’t always speak louder than words

Since the riots the focus has turned to sentencing and questions about the purpose of criminal justice and the severity of punishments dominate. But as legal processes and political strategies come under scrutiny, what is obscured is the language.

Cameron’s out of touch rhetoric has gone unnoticed among promises of policy reform. His references to a ‘broken society’ are not only repetitive but damaging and Cameron’s talk of society’s ‘moral collapse’ as a problem that needs to be ‘defeated’ betrays his flawed approach: problems are solved not conquered. This combative attitude pervades the government’s response. Threats of welfare cuts and evictions from council houses are not only bad policies but policies that seem motivated by a knee jerk populist reaction.

Whilst promises of a ‘social’ and ‘security fight back’ satiate the public appetite for punishment and enhance the tough image the Tories so keenly seek, such language can only make matters worse. The rhetoric fails to instil faith in the disaffected that politicians will address pressing social needs and the disaffection is reinforced when politicians dismiss these social needs as a societal malaise. The effect is to compound the sentiment that catalysed some of the disenfranchised into mass criminality.

Cameron’s response to the riots has also exposed him as out of touch in a second sense. He has been accused in the past of ‘middle-classism’, of propagating a social model composed of a nuclear family with 1.9 children, a pet dog and, it would seem, an innate understanding of what it means to be upstanding citizens. Cameron may not have used these words but he has resurrected the old demons that threaten this ideal. Fatherless homes, gangs and gang culture, lack of discipline and the loss of a sense of community have all been cited to substantiate clichés about society’s moral decay.

Most disconcerting is the increasingly moralistic parlance of the cabinet’s responses. The problem with this moralism is its hypocrisy and its naivety.

Firstly, there seems to be a cognitive dissonance in Westminster between what politicians have done and what they condemn. I don’t think that someone living on benefits can easily be persuaded that the ‘middle class looting’ of the bankers or the ‘official looting’ of the expenses scandal is something entirely different to the looting carried out during the riots. The looting can be distinguished strongly on the basis of property damage but less so with theft.

The political class can’t escape the opportunistic example they set as much as they can’t blame the disenfranchised for having little faith in them. A recent study by Essex and Royal Holloway universities suggests that ‘lack of trust in politicians’ was a key factor in making ‘a significant minority…available for participation in acts of mass illegality’. The legacy of the expenses scandal is a deep-rooted mistrust of politicians. This being so, the government’s language should avoid the hypocrisy of pointing the moral finger and placing moral blame on the rioters. A way to regain the loss of trust might be an acknowledgement that politicians were also involved, regardless of the extent, in society’s sudden moral collapse.

Secondly, Cameron demonstrates staggering naivety with regard to the government’s influence if he believes that he can mend society’s broken moral compass by his programme of ‘tough love’. Morals are something society, and the government by extension, can demand and enforce but never instil. As interviews of rioters reveal, the problem is not the inability to distinguish between right and wrong but indifference. The problem is not one of understanding or of awareness but of attitude. If this attitude is to be challenged, instinctively, would honey not be more effective than vinegar?

Those who say that it is naïve to argue that more moderate and constructive language was called for after the riots need only look to Tariq Jahan, who’s stoic appeal for calm and for unity, after his son’s death, prevented violence flaring again in the streets of Birmingham.

It seems that the old adage that actions speak louder than words has held true and led the cabinet to act before they listened. In an effort to be seen to have responded swiftly and forcefully to the riots, the cabinet’s language was reckless. As facts emerged about the demographic of the rioters, it became clear that they belonged to no particular class or culture. Ken Clarke’s description of a ‘feral underclass’ was therefore inaccurate. And Theresa May’s back tracking, particularly in relation to the causes of the riots and the involvement of gangs, during her select committee questioning serves as another example of the way in which the government drew conclusions before gathering information.

On election, Cameron assured us that he would not respond to every crisis with ‘headline grabbing programmes’. He has either forgotten or deliberately scrapped that commitment. Instead, Cameron and his cabinet could learn that measured and proportionate language is perfectly consistent with taking a tough stance and this approach, rather than tabloid friendly talk of war or morality, might be a way in which they could begin to overcome the ‘them against us’ mentality that at present they seem to be entrenching.

Ram Mashru

Related articles

• We must talk to the rioters, not turn our backs on them | Martin Kettle (guardian.co.uk)
• Cameron rejects claim politicians’ behaviour was to blame for riots (independent.co.uk)
• Riots stoked by mistrust of politicians, says report (independent.co.uk)
• London Riots 2011: David Cameron Wants Reverse In UK’s ‘Slow-Motion Moral Collapse’ (huffingtonpost.com)

Generation 9/11

There have been many attempts to brand the generation that lived their formative teenage years during the first decade of the millennium. The Big Brother or X Factor generation are among the more cynical. But we can be nothing other than the 9/11 generation for whom 9/11 was the day zero of our political lives, the day that shaped our awareness of politics, of disaster and of the wider world.

Of course I remember where and when I heard about the terrorist attacks. It wasn’t the fictional loss of innocence that novels tell us about. As an eleven year old, I was a spectator old enough to understand the scale of the attacks but too young to comprehend their significance. I, like those born a few years before and after me, lacked the foresight to understand fully the significance of an attack on the twin symbols of American economic and political dominance. Instead it was a moment defined by childish ignorance and childish curiosity. A moment that at the time sat alongside the banalities of moving to a new school and making new friends. But I was palpably aware then that the questions that loomed over the attacks would take some time to be answered and even longer to be understood.

People my age would have had no memory of the bombed US embassies in Africa and so lacked any concept of an emerging pattern of violence. Without the benefit of history or context, 9/11 was an isolated incident and this made the images of the towers collapsing all the more shocking. Looking back, 9/11 was the high point of Al-Qaeda’s attacks. That nothing on the scale of 9/11 has occurred since is something David Miliband and Robert Peele attribute to the preventative action taken in Afghanistan. But for my generation, 9/11 was the first attack and so became a reference point against which everything since has been rationalised. 9/11 was an automatic initiation into the adult world, an initiation that hardened us to the catastrophes that followed. The Bali bombings, 7/7, Madrid and even unrelated terror attacks like those in Mumbai became pieces in an elaborate puzzle.

Members of generation 9/11 are defined not by our age but by the way in which our world-views were born and shaped by the attacks. We share the same lessons that politicians, journalists and military personnel say they’ve only now learnt. The only difference being that the lessons of diplomacy, accountability and of the sanctity of human dignity are the very first ones we learned. Lessons that were reinforced as we travelled further down the tunnel of adulthood and as the full implications of Bush’s ‘war on terror’ unravelled.

The now notorious remarks of Leon Panetta, the US Defence Secretary, explaining to troops in Iraq that they were there because ‘on 9/11 the United States got attacked’ may have been ignorant, by forging a non-existent connection between Al-Qaeda and Sadam’s regime, or may have been a rallying call. But what the remarks evidence is the post 9/11 attitude that war was the solution. We now know that America’s global war on terror has been carried out at the expense of $1.4 trillion and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. The importance of diplomacy has been stressed again and again by the fact that ten years on, troops remain in Afghanistan. By the fact that the reckless language of a ‘war on terror’ risked elevating the status of terrorists to warriors and risked legitimising the evil agenda of Al-Qaeda. And that ten years on, in the same region, we witness the way in which international condemnation and limited military assistance can help people topple their own oppressive regimes.

We are also a generation exposed early to Thomas Paine’s truth that ‘the greatest tyrannies are perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes’. It was to prevent these tyrannies that we emerged as a generation prepared to hold our governments to account, that we are highly suspicious of our elected officials. A generation that watched a million march through London in protest against the decision to invade Iraq. And we are a generation, inspired by those scenes of peaceful protest, that took to the streets ourselves to protest against cuts to our higher education.

And facts about Abu Ghraib and images of Guantanamo only rooted more deeply the idea that at no point must we compromise on liberty in the name of security. Recent exposures of US and British intelligence collusion with the Gaddafi regime in the torture of suspected terrorists only reinforce the importance of upholding our core values at all times. We are a generation that has grown up under the scrutiny of ever more CCTV cameras and a generation that faced the possibility of living life subject to ID cards. We are a generation that have embraced the substance and the vernacular of human rights. A generation that were asked but refused to believe that waterboarding wasn’t torture and that control orders were a proportionate, if not necessary, measure to protect our national security. We are a generation that understood that human rights and security are inextricably linked, so that fighting terror at the expense of fundamental rights was an affront to ourselves and ultimately counter-productive to our strategic efforts. And we are a generation that understood that the terror attacks were as much an affront to human dignity as they were an assault on American security. We are a generation that grew immediately and acutely aware of Nietzsche’s warning to ‘be careful when fighting monsters lest we become monsters ourselves’.

Ultimately we are a generation that have gained because we had known nothing else. The positive that we derived from the attacks was that by knowing nothing other than a post 9/11 world, we are a generation who’s world view is centred around the core ideals of diplomacy, of liberty and of the primacy of human dignity.

Ram Mashru

The Nuclear Distraction: why we must not cast a blind eye on Iran’s violations of fundamental rights

Western preoccupation with Iran’s uranium enrichment programme has distracted the international focus away from the other key issue: that of the government’s human rights violations. International groups have called for a UN led effort to hold Iran to account for its violation of international treaty obligations, and for the contempt it shows for both the international community and its own citizens. If the UN is to be effective, the international community must apply more consistent pressure.

Voluntary human rights obligations

Iran has ratified numerous international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and conventions on issues such as racial discrimination and children’s rights. Such obligations have been frequently violated. Thus UN reports highlight government persecution of minority groups, imprisonment of political activists, torture and the executions of its most ardent opponents.

Iran’s response to criticism over its human rights record, that foreign governments shouldn’t interfere in its internal political matters, is difficult to justify. Voluntarily undertaken human rights obligations are not internal political matters but legal norms defined and substantiated by international law.

UN inefficacy

Maziar Bahari, an Iranian journalist imprisoned in Iran for 119 days, has argued that the UN must lead the effort to hold Iran to account. He argues that the UN is one of the few international institutions recognised by Iran as legitimate and so has urged the UN to mandate an official investigator in Iran.

But the UN is not the solution. Propositions involving the UN both overestimate the persuasive force of UN demands and fail to recognise the contempt Iran has shown to this institution. The Universal Period Review carried out in February by the UN Office of Human Rights is an example of both the impotence of UN efforts and the lip service paid to this organization by Iran.

The UPR has made recommendations to improve human rights protection in line with Iran’s treaty obligations. Iran claims to be willing to cooperate with the UNHRC but its response to the recommendations has been described as ‘cynical’ by Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International has led the criticism of the inconsistency with which the Iranian government responded, condemning in particular Iran’s acceptance of the recommendation to respect religious freedom but rejection of the request to end discrimination of Baha’is, a religious minority. The government further rejected recommendations to end juvenile executions, rejected guarantees to uphold fair trials, refused to investigate torture and rape allegations and refused to release people detained for peacefully exercising their human rights. Hassiba Sahraoui, the Middle East Deputy Director at Amnesty International, has argued that the rejection of certain recommendations and acceptance of others similar, casts doubt on the prospect of proper implementation.

Other UN attempts to address the rights’ abuses have been restrained and UN General Assembly Resolution 64/176 is timid. In it the General Assembly express their ‘deep concern’ at extra-judicial executions, floggings and amputations as punishments and of the persistent failure to provide due process of law rights. They also express their ‘concern’ over the worsening of human rights violations after the 2009 Presidential election. And yet the resolution ends by a mere ‘call’ for cooperation, a ‘request’ for the Secretary General to submit another report and commits the UN to continue examining human rights in Iran. A General Assembly resolution is a demand without a sanction.

Missed opportunities

The disputed 2009 elections are emblematic of the gross human rights violations in Iran. Critics of the government were arbitrarily arrested, harassed, detained, imprisoned and tortured. The government claimed to be carrying out investigations into the torture and killings but no one appears to have been brought to justice. Iran continues to mislead the Human Rights Council by making claims that it will implement recommendations made by Governments to conduct transparent and independent investigations. But according to Amnesty International, Iranian security forces continue to arrest, detain or convict those alleged to be involved in the post-election unrest. Political and civil society activists remain in prison and, according to the Iranian judiciary, 250 people have been prosecuted in relation to the post-election unrest and at least six of those accused of taking part are at risk of execution after their death sentences were confirmed by appellate courts.

The flagrant human rights abuses committed during the 2009 election were an opportunity for the international community to unite behind the UN and demand reform. The reluctance of the international community to mount an effective challenge at the time has cost the complete loss of political momentum. With the dust having settled on the election, the international community remains once again singularly focussed on the nuclear threat.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN Summit last year represented another opportunity lost by the international community to engage directly with Iran over its human rights record. When Obama condemned Mr Ahmadinejad’s ‘hateful’ speech, he was predictably light handed on the issue of human rights. The White House transcript of an interview with Obama after the Summit is embarrassing evidence of just how little political space and time was dedicated to the issue of Iran’s human rights abuses. Obama claimed to ‘stand by’ the Iranian people but not once called on Iran to reform and Obama was quick to say he had ‘no interest’ in ‘meddling’ with the rights of people to choose their own government. But what is needed is not a claim to stand by the Iranian people but an effort to speak for the Iranian political and civil activists silenced by imprisonment and torture.

The case for political pressure

Political pressure mounted by the international community is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, the UN is the only international institution that is legally empowered and therefore justified in holding Iran to account. Any action taken by the international community that would circumvent UN machinery would be illegitimate. Instead, UN member states must support this body because is it clear that Iran has no intention of taking the Human Rights Council and, by extension, the UN, seriously.

Secondly, political pressure is necessary because the international community is obliged to speak on behalf of silenced Iranian activists. For Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize Winning Iranian human rights activist, of paramount importance is the release of civil and political detainees in Iran. Like so many others working to restore human rights in Iran, Mrs Ebadi recognises that the Iranian people must be allowed the opportunity to hold their own government to account. So long as civil and political activists are suppressed, the Iranian people are denied the ability to demand their human rights for themselves. The lack of a political voice of the Iranian people is why the international community must speak on their behalf. The international community must not ‘meddle’ with their rights, must not impose its own understanding of human rights, but simply need do as Obama claims, and stand by the Iranian people by voicing their complaints.

The question that will be asked is whether political pressure will be effective when legal measures have proved futile. But the question should not be one of efficacy but one of necessity. The international community must transform their silent signatures on UN Resolutions into insistent political criticism because the Iranian people, for fear of intimidation, imprisonment and torture, are unable to criticise the government for themselves. The international community must condemn Iran’s human rights violations in the same way it has condemned Iran’s uranium enrichment. The Iranian government may be blind to the human rights abuses it perpetrates but it cannot be deaf to international political condemnation.

 Conclusions

A parliamentary report published in 2009 described the human rights abuses in Iran as systematic, yet little parliamentary time has been spent discussing the government response to these abuses. Occasional political statements and a few early day Parliamentary motions do not amount to political pressure. The British government need to do more and should lead the international community in holding Mr Ahmadinejad’s administration to account.

It is widely felt that ‘the West’ is hesitant to complicate the dialogue with Iran over the nuclear programme by discussing human rights or regional peace. Mrs Ebadi argues that non-democratic, non-liberal states like Iran pose a greater threat to peace in the Middle East than nuclear weapons. She goes further to accuse Western governments of forgetting about the subrogation of human rights in Iran since the beginning of Iran’s nuclear programme.

The nuclear programme has ensured that Iran remains central to western foreign policy concerns.  The argument made is one of political reemphasis, not of political refocus: concern about the nuclear threat is self-evidently important, but the threatened nuclear capability should not dominate political discussion to the exclusion of gross human rights violations. As a signatory to human rights treaties, Iran is in violation of international law as a result of its abuses of fundamental rights and governments must hold Iran to account for this. The West is obliged to give the issue of rights violations the space it deserves in political discourse because we have a legal and moral duty to hold the Iranian government to account for the violations of voluntarily undertaken human rights obligations.

Ram Mashru