Azadeh Moaveni
At some point in the 100-day detention of Ghoncheh Ghavami, the 25-year-old law graduate from London who is being held in Tehran’s Evin prison, Iranian authorities will have whispered into the ears of her mother: “Don’t make a fuss to the media, we’ll get her out more quickly.” That is the cynical promise they always make to the families of Iranians arrested for political crimes, and this time, as ever, it has been proved false. First detained in June for trying to attend a volleyball match, Ghavami remains in prison on charges of spreading propaganda against the regime, though her only real crime is one of civil disobedience. The state forbids women from attending sporting matches, and Ghavami chose to challenge this injustice. This week she began a hunger strike.
Her case is of special concern to Britain because Ghavami is a British-Iranian, but Iran does not recognise dual nationality and the country’s judiciary is treating her as it would any Iranian citizen who opposes its laws: with harsh confinement and no due process. Alongside Ghavami, thousands of other ordinary Iranians are marooned in the Islamic Republic’s prisons for crimes of conscience, facing everything from extortionate bails, indeterminate prison time and summary execution. The UN special rapporteur for human rights recently said that Iran’s situation remains serious and shows no sign of improvement.
But with the international community drawing close to a historic deal with Iran on its nuclear programme, what can be done? As Islamic State (Isis) makes gains across Iraq and Syria and laps at the borders of Lebanon and Jordan, the past six months have only underscored how vital a potential nuclear accord with Iran will be to the region’s security.
There is reasonable concern that highlighting human rights cases in Iran often has unintended consequences, both for the individuals the west aims to defend and for the broader aims of diplomacy. When the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, met women’s rights activists during her trip to Iran in March, conservatives lashed out, calling on the government of President Hassan Rouhani to block such “intolerable interventions”. The Fars news agency called Ashton’s meeting part of a “suspicious” plan to interfere in Iran’s affairs. These same hardliners were so incensed by David Cameron’s remarks about Iran at the UN general assembly that they demanded Tehran reject Britain’s presence on the international community’s nuclear negotiation team. “You no longer have an empire to boss us around with,” the head of Iran’s parliament said.
It is no coincidence that Iranian authorities are charging Ghavami with propaganda against the regime, rather than simply flouting a social code. In the eyes of Iran’s hardliners, a women’s movement whose leaders meet Ashton are simply stooges of the west. And when the international community shouts selectively about human rights it encourages conservatives to feel that they are being hectored again by “Little Satan” Britain or “Great Satan” America.
This inconsistency plays to Iranians’ understandable sense of historical injustice and double standards. Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia that cooperate with the west on security, however nominally, get to behead their citizens with impunity.
But will the nuclear talks be genuinely endangered if the west criticises Iran for Ghavami’s detention, or for its sustained campaign against journalists? The reality is that Iran’s leadership has finally agreed to negotiate on its nuclear programme to secure relief from sanctions. The brief word that the UK’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, recently had in New York with Iranian diplomats about Ghavami, or indeed Ashton’s visit with activists in Tehran, did not prompt Iran to walk away. In fact, it was only after journalists and officials peppered the Rouhani delegation at the UN general assembly with concerns about the imprisonment of two journalists working for the Washington Post and the UAE-based the National that this week the latter was released.
Even the histrionics of Iran’s hardliners, with their ripe memories of imperial injustice, are not reason enough for the west to strip human rights from its approach to Iran.
Iran’s extremists see themselves as permanent victims, and that view is unlikely to change if their interlocutors stop bringing up cases of genuine victims – Iranians such as Ghavami who are denied basic legal rights.
Neither would being soft on human rights strengthen the hand of Rouhani, whose government represents the forces of reform ultimately trying to wrest control of Iran from the hardline-run deep state. If human rights issues are a sustained part of the conversation when the west sits down at the table with Iran, pragmatists like Rouhani can slowly persuade Iran’s top leadership that the rapprochement so desperately needed to fix the economy will also require some attention to citizens’ welfare.
But too often there has been little balance in how the west approaches Iran’s human rights problem. President Obama, for example, generally makes one annual spring rebuke. What we must strive for is consistency, including human rights concerns as part of the ongoing political approach to Iran so that it becomes a fixed expectation in Tehran as well.
Iranian leaders will see that how they treat their citizens is a permanent strategic issue for the west, not an occasional political tool with which to whack the Islamic Republic.
Ghavami, according to friends in London, voted for Rouhani in last year’s presidential election, and travelled to Iran in heed of the president’s call for diaspora Iranians to return to their homeland. A truly stable Iran will be one that follows through on its promises to its citizens, or is at least held accountable when it does not. By raising citizens’ rights regularly, they will seem less a political tool to batter Iran when it is expedient than a permanent concern.
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