The Abu Qatada judgment undermines the fight against torture

This article has been published in The Huffington Post.

The UK for the last 10 years has tried to extradite Abu Qatada, a terror suspect, to Jordan where he faces trial on charges of terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights however ruled last week that such a deportation is illegal because Qatada is likely to face an unjust trial. On these sparse facts, hysterical rights sceptics have re-energised their attack on human rights, as Trojan horse being used to undermine Parliament’s sovereign will. But, it is the human rights community, not panicky politicians, that should be alarmed by the Court’s decision.  The decision is one in which the fight against torture suffers a mighty blow.Chief sceptic is Philip Johnston for whom the judgment was an instance of human rights being manipulated by a terrorist to “fool” Britain. Of all the MPs with an opinion on the matter it’s unsurprising that Johnston quotes Raab, a fellow libertarian and rights-sceptic. It serves as evidence of their thoughtless hostility to human rights that they both miss the implications of the case and miss it so widely.

The Court, for present purposes, decided two issues and in doing so, established a far-reaching rule, from which it carved a narrow exception. The Court ruled that extraditions, to countries suspected of carrying out torture, were lawful provided diplomatic assurances had been procured. By so deciding, the Court ruled in favour of the UK Government. Indeed it praised the detail and depth of the understanding our government had agreed with their Jordanian counterparts. Put another way, a diplomatic assurance is now all that is needed to safeguard a convict from the threat of torture.

This rephrasing is hardly needed to expose the gaping flaw in the Court’s reasoning. Diplomatic assurances, essentially gentleman’s agreements, have now been elevated to the status of substantive rights protections. Far from subverting the will of the Parliament, the Court have struck a death blow to efforts to expose ‘torture treaties’ between states, to the effort to uncover the practice of torture and to the effort to condemn States for turning a blind eye. In what is perhaps its most politically deferential judgment yet, the Court have relegated all concerns about the torture of terror suspects by placing complete and blind faith in the invisible processes of international relations.

Despite the diplomatic assurance, the Court ruled Abu Qatada’s deportation would be illegal under Article 6, which enshrines the right to a fair trial. By taking into account the real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be used to incriminate Abu Qatada, the Court reasoned that to allow the deportation would be to countenance an “immoral, illegal” and “unreliable” trial. Without the risk of corrupt evidence being used against him, Qatada would have been deported and so potential article 6 infringements constitute a narrow defence to the far-reaching diplomatic assurances rule. It is this narrow exception that has been typically mischaracterised by Johnston and is ilk.

There is rightful consternation among human rights groups. The diplomatic assurances rule amounts to an “alarming setback” according to Julia Hall of Amnesty International, and represents taking “one step forward, two steps back”. The “positive development” of the Article 6 exception, she argued, was “eclipsed” by the Court’s decision to substitute diplomatic assurances for binding legal obligations. States, particularly in the anti-terror context, have eroded prohibitions on torture and the European Court’s decision amounts to a “green light” on securing “unreliable” assurances in the place of legal guarantees. Human Rights Watch and Liberty have echoed these criticisms.

Several options remain open in the Qatada case. The quickest solution would be to seek assurances that improper evidence would not be used. Alternatively, there is nothing preventing Qatada going on trial in the UK and Shami Chakrabati has urged that this be done “without delay”. Or, the UK Government could appeal the European Court’s decision. Doing so will add a few more years to Qatada’s already 7 year internment. It should be noted that Qatada has spent this time in the confines of a jail cell, without charge.

The law of human rights is, at its core, the process of balancing competing demands. Abu Qatada’s case is but one example of the effort to weigh the demands of national security against the rights of the individual. With the diplomatic assurances innovation, the Court has eased the process of deporting terror suspects to places where the risk of torture is both real and high. In doing so, they have abdicated their apolitical mediating role and devolved responsibility for protecting potential torture victims to the whispered negotiations of governmental corridors.

Ram Mashru

‘It’s a girl: the three deadliest words in the world’

This article has been republished in The Independent. 

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.

Ram Mashru

Why the Conservatives are wrong about rights

On Saturday the Telegraph front page ran a story about the Tory commitment to reclaim rights from Europe. The new battle lines are drawn over issues of ‘social policy’, over which the Court is alleged to be trespassing upon the proper domain of Parliament.

This fresh bout of euro-rights-scepticism has its roots in the fallout over prisoner’s voting rights. David Cameron said he felt ‘physically ill’ at the prospect of prisoners exercising their right to vote. According to Cameron, the issue of prisoners voting is but one aspect of the ‘corrosive influence’ of the Court’s decisions on ‘British life’.

Ken Clarke said, “human rights are misused.” What he should have said is that human rights are misrepresented. By fuelling contempt for the European Court the Conservatives misrepresent the Court’s role and neglect the contribution made to rights protection in the UK.

The government’s complaint is that the Court is deciding matters of British social policy. Let’s see about that.

In Marckx v Belgium, the Court declared its decisions ‘cannot annul or repeal’ national judgments or laws; the Court’s decisions are merely declaratory. Parliament, at all times, retains its discretion in how to respond to the European Court’s decisions. Indeed the Court regularly invokes the ‘margin of appreciation’, an adjudicative device that allows states discretion in the administrative, legislative or judicial action required to address rights violations.

If anything, the advisory nature of the Court’s judgments and the deference shown to member states’ decision making are evidence of the Court’s political awareness. It acknowledges the greater proximity of member states to individual cases, the greater capability of national courts to adjudicate on the facts and the unique competence of governments to develop policy.

Even so, the argument that the Court intervenes in matters of social policy is without foundation. The European Court accepts that States are solely responsible for deciding contentious issues. In the seminal case of Vo v France, the Court took account of differences at national level to decide it was for member states to determine when the right to life began, in cases of abortion. Equally, in the Pretty litigation, the Court ruled consistently with the (then) House of Lords, that the DPP should provide guidelines on prosecution in cases of assisted suicide.

When it comes to social policy, the European Court is not the quasi-political institution the Conservatives would have us believe. The issue of prisoner’s voting rights has been shamefully mischaracterised. Article 3 of Protocol 1 guarantees the right to ‘the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature’. Whether prisoners have the right to vote is not a matter of policy but of law.

The Court’s decision is unobjectionable. It ruled that a blanket ban on voting for prisoners with custodial sentences was an infringement of their rights. This was qualified by an acceptance that member states enjoy a ‘margin of appreciation’ and that ‘proportionate’ action can take whatever form ‘the government considers appropriate’. What the judgment contemplates is that the denial of the right to vote be made on case-by-case basis. Not as nauseating as Cameron would make it sound.

In the process of misrepresenting the prisoner’s voting rights debate, the political right have started making dangerous noises. Philip Johnston, in the Telegraph, suggests the ‘responsibility [of] compliance’ be handed back to ‘member states’. The suggestion is laughable. But if taken seriously, it opens the way for all out non-compliance. States regularly violate human rights and the Court plays a crucial role in holding States to account. Academics insist that the Convention, and the Court as its enforcer, radiate constant pressure for the maintenance of rights standards. Removing the watchdog removes the compulsion to comply.

Britain’s record on immigration before the European Court is poor and he risk of severing ties is that fundamental rights will be violated, by the State, with impunity.

The cabinet and the country need to be reminded of the valuable role played by the Court in establishing consistency across Europe. The Court has substantiated the fundamental rights that everyone deserves but that were otherwise too vague to be enforced. Far from having a corrosive effect, the European Court has enhanced the rights enjoyed by the British people.

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)

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