To: 
 _His Excellency Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, New York,  Fax ++1 212 963 4879

 _ Her Excellency Mary Robinson, United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland, Fax ++41 22 917 0123
 _Professor Maurice D. Copithorne, QC, Fax ++1 604 822 8108, Email: copithorne@law.ubc.ca
 _His Excellency Vaclav Havel, President of Czech Republic, Fax: ++42-02-24310851
 _The Honorable Jesse Jackson, Rainbow/Push Coalition, Chicago, Fax:  ++1 773 373 3571
 _Ms June Ray, Director, Middle East Program, Amnesty International, London, Fax: ++44 171 956 1157, Email: amnestyis@amnesty.org
 _Mr Neal Hicks, Coordinator, Middle East and North Africa Program, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, New York, Fax ++1 212 967 0916, Email: mecoord@lchr.org
 _Mr Hanny Megally, Director of Middle East Watch, New York, Fax: ++1 212 736 1300, Email: hickse@hrw.org
 _ Professor Narciso Matos, Secretary General of Association of African Universities, Accra-North, Ghana, Email: secgen@aau.org
 _ Professor Linda Souter, President of International Federation of
University  Women, Geneva, Switzerland, Fax ++41 22 738 0440, Email: info@ifuw.org
 _ Professor Franz Eberhard, Secretary General of the International
Association of Universities, UNESCO Office, Paris, Fax: ++1 331 4734 7605,
Email: iau@unesco.org, Emaileberhard.iau@unesco.or

---

Summary of an Address by

Hedayat Matine-Daftary to the Seminar for

the Defence of Human Rights in Iran,

Free University of Brussles, 11 December 1999

In 1969, the year of the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the eminent French jurist René Cassin wrote that ‘the Universal Declaration reflects the deep-rooted and eternal ideals of human individuals for freedom and equality and minimum security. It is a plan for extensive positive action. But today no country, even the most advanced, can boast that it observes all of them. With constant effort and mobilisation of world opinion, the influence of the Declaration can be increased because the Declaration is based on the principle of the unity of mankind and the dignity and the worth of the human person. It is the source of the moral principles of our age and the majestic and eternal construction above the constitutional laws of all nations – laws which can evolve and change as against rights which are unchangeable.

 

Cassin believed firmly that without organisations to defend and promote them, human rights would be nothing and he constantly encouraged others to form them. That is why this meeting is of particular importance, for its organisers are seeking to defend a movement in Iran which strives for human rights which, as Cassin constantly emphasised, are universal and whose defence has no boundaries.

 

Cassin made the comments we have just quoted at a time when the Cold War was generating once more just the sort of tragedy that the Universal Declaration had hoped to prevent – the mass murder of communists in Indonesia and the sufferings that accompanied the Chinese cultural revolution. He did not live to witness either the massacres carried out by Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia or, during the year of the 30th anniversary of the Declaration, the rise of Khomeini in Iran, two of the most serious blows to the cause of human rights to appear in the late 20th century.

 

Khomeini's Islamic Republic declared war on modern culture and civilization and on the values of the enlightenment, not only in Iran but throughout the world. It created a political system which defined the human person as one whose responsibility before God is absolute obedience to His representative, the vali-ye faqih. In other words, what Khomeini imposed was a kind of political totalitarianism and despotism in which only the guide decides and the human being, in direct contrast to the concept of the human being enshrined in the Universal Declaration, is a being with no tongue who cannot and should not think for him or herself. Enshrined in a constitution which deprives the nation of its sovereignty, and in an Islamized legal system which violates the fundamental rights listed in the Declaration, Khomeini's new theocracy legally divided the nation into believers and non-believers, conformists and non-conformists, religious minorities and non-minorities.

 

The movement against the Shah was based on a demand for political and social freedoms and for human rights. But in the aftermath of the Revolution many of those very political prisoners who were freed at the time and many others who were deprived of freedom and democracy under the Shah's dictatorship, irrespective of their position in or vis-à-vis the provisional government, ignored and in many respects even negated human rights in the course of their activities. While Khomeini was planning to impose his theocracy, the National Democratic Front of Iran made a declaration that individual and social freedoms, as well as the dignity and worth of the human person, may only be secured, on this 30th anniversary of human rights, if the future constitution of Iran embodies what the representatives of nations 30 years ago accepted following the fall of Nazism. But even part of the opposition to a theocratic government went as far as to dismiss as 'treacherous liberals' and 'decadent bourgeois' those who opposed Khomeini's efforts to prevent the establishment of a properly constituted Constituent Assembly and went on to participate in elections to Khomeini's Assembly of Experts, thus giving it legitimacy. Khomeini, in other words, was successful in part because he was able to take advantage of ignorance of and lack of attention to human rights and to exploit the 'anti-imperialist' sentiments of many who were not his natural supporters. One often wonders whether, if the first wave of executions of members of the ancien regime, which took place without proper legal protection and protection of human rights, had been opposed, the later waves of executions under Khomeini, might have been avoided.

 

Two decades after the Revolution, and a decade after Khomeini's death, the violation of human rights in Iran still continues and the country is still under UN scrutiny. The Special Representative's Human Rights Report for 1999 remarks that, among other violations, 'the reform of the legal system remains a critical issue', executions remain at an unacceptably high level and torture prevails.

 

But the situation now differs. With the disappearance of the unifying leader, the country has entered an era of post-totalitarianism and the population has become active. It has set aside its feelings of hopelessness and fear and has begun to demand and even take its rights. The young now speak their mind and demand not just freedom of speech but 'freedom after speech' and have begun to question the aura of the vali-ye faqih.

 

And yet, while the establishment boasts of 'civil society' and the 'institutionalisation of the rule of law' as objectives which it pursues within the framework of the constitution of the Islamic Republic, no action has yet been taken against those who ordered or those who carried out last year's chain killings of opposition leaders and intellectuals, despite claims that they would be vigorously investigated. Why? Because the killings that are instigated by fatwas, and those responsible for them, are protected by and are within the very 'law' upon which the Islamic republic is based. Many other such assassinations have remained uninvestigated and unresolved.

 

This takes us to another feature of the current situation. The principles upon which its political system is based, both written and unwritten, have created in the Islamic Republic a new apartheid, far more complex than the apartheid between black and white which existed in South Africa: an apartheid which divides men from women, mainstream Ja'afari Shi'i from other Moslems, Moslems from other recognised minorities, believers from non-believers, 'heretics' and other types of non-conformists, and so on. But the most striking division nowadays, and one that has only recently been articulated, is the that between khodi and qeireh-khodi: 'us' and 'them', those who belong and those who do not. It is a more diffuse difference than the others mentioned here, but one that carries powerful cultural, social and political signifiers. In general it distinguishes those who 'belong' to the social groups who have been 'insiders' in the Islamic Revolution from the rest of society.

 

Those who are khodi have rights and privileges denied to the rest and on this basis there are double standards everywhere in Iran which, since the conflict between Islamic reformers and conservatives and the President's faction and the rest has gathered force, have become particularly marked in the legal system. One could cite numerous clear examples of the differential treatment of two types of dissenters, khodi and qeireh khodi, but a few will have to suffice. Manuchehr Mohammadi, a qeireh khodi, is arrested for his part in the student's movement, tortured to produce a confession and condemned to 13 years in prison in a closed court while his brother Akbar is condemned to death; Ahmad Bateni (qeireh-khodi), whose picture appeared on the cover of The Economist last summer, is tried in absolute secrecy and gets 10 years. But khodi student activists are frequently released quickly, with or without bail. Mehran Mir Abdol Baqi, a younger member of the Mellat-e Iran party, is condemned to nine years of imprisonment without anyone knowing where, when and how his trial took place. No-one knows the fate of leaders of the same party, secular dissenters arrested in July.  Whereas, when a leading khodi such as Abdullah Nouri is arrested he is released on bail, is interviewed right and left, is given a lot of publicity, his trial is not secret and his defence is publicised everywhere. When the khodi is condemned to imprisonment the mode of his imprisonment is also different.

 

This is not to say that the khodi has not also been denied a fair trial or suffered from arbitrary sentencing and even from some rough handling. But the double standard exists and has unfortunately resulted in a situation that has mislead human rights monitors with no direct access to the country, who have sometimes concluded that the judicial system is improving and based their assessments on the more favourable standards and not on the standards that are still quietly and in secret applied to dissenters who are not 'one of us.'

 

It is said that Mr Khatami has good will and wants to establish the rule of law. But, we must ask, what is the meaning of the rule of law in this context? The constitution of the Islamic Republic legalises despotism, as well as inhuman and cruel punishments and acts which degrade human dignity. Such a rule of law can only help to preserve the established theocracy and to lengthen its life and power. It stands in contrast to the rule of rights based upon the moral and natural laws or human rights laws as codified in the Declaration of Human Rights which is universal, indivisible and interdependent, as reiterated in the 1993 Vienna conference – the law of which Lord Acton said in 1895 'Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.'

 

Hedayat Matine-Daftary

B.M. Gonville

London WC1N 3XX

E-mail: ndfi@azadi-iran.org