Shadi Mokhtari

WASHINGTON—One year after Iran’s dubious presidential election, the achievements of the opposition Green Movement should not be overlooked. While its path remains long and arduous, the movement has already transformed the way human rights are conceived, talked about, and fought for in Iran. Some of the most significant gains of the movement’s momentous year are worth considering in more depth.

First, the Green Movement has produced what can be considered a psychological shift. Human rights violations and repression tend to have one of two vastly different effects: they can produce submission through fear and intimidation or they can arouse outrage and resistance. For most of its tenure, the Islamic Republic had successfully employed repression to secure its rule. In the first few months following last June’s disputed election, however, collective acquiescence gave way to collective defiance.

Of the countless human rights abuses that afflicted Iran over the last year, three became particularly prominent. The first was the case of Neda Agha Soltan, the 27- year-old woman who was shot during the initial round of post-election protests. Life leaving her body was vividly captured on a cell phone video and viewed by millions around the world via the internet. The second case was that of Mohsen Ruhollamini, the son of a conservative politician who was detained in Kahrizak prison along with other protestors. He died two weeks later amid reports that when his parents received his body, his face was smashed in. The third prominent case was that of the Green Movement leader (and cleric) Mehdi Karroubi’s public disclosure of the systematic rapes of detainees by their interrogators.

In each of these cases, a handful of individuals emerged to publicly disclose an egregious human rights violation committed by the state. Common among these individuals is a sense that the truth about the regime’s violence can no longer remain unspoken. The sentiment is captured by Arash Hejazi, a doctor who tried to help Neda Agha Soltan. “In every life, a moment comes that the integrity of some person would be tested, and I realized on that day this was the moment in my life that I had to choose whether to keep myself safe or prove my integrity”.

Collectively, Iranians displayed a similar sensibility. Each publicized case of death, torture or rape, spurred widespread indignation. In response to threats that he be arrested and prosecuted for spreading lies about the regime, Mehdi Karrubi declared that “the real trial is before the people.” This is an apt characterization of what happened in Iran over the past year. In many ways the state was put on trial by its subjects. Particularly in the case of the systematic rapes in detention, it was the regime that came to be thought of as morally corrupt, vile and pathological, not the victims as the crime’s perpetrators had intended.

Beyond spurring the psychological leap which enabled Iranians to openly challenge their governments’ blatant abuses of power, the Green Movement also clearly transcended important red lines banning explicit references and condemnations of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic.

In previous eras, including the time of former reformist president Mohamad Khatami, discussions of rights were generally more coded, abstract or philosophical. Since last June however, public discourse has focused on the regime’s most severe rights violations, namely torture and politically motivated executions and there has been little mincing of words. In fact, not only has the movement created the space to openly call the regime’s worst atrocities by their names, it has taken on an impressive project of meticulously documenting the violations taking place through victim accounts, forensic evidence and other means.

Similarly, there is a noticeable move away from the embedding of rights claims exclusively in Islamic doctrine and discourses predominant during the Khatami reform era, towards increasingly universal notions of rights. Throughout the past year, opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi along with other reformist figures frequently referred to the Islamic Republic’s behavior as “un-Islamic” or an affront to Islam. However, their discussions of the state’s human rights violations did not stop there. Just as frequently, they invoked the rights guarantees of the Iranian constitution, broader values of human morality and the notion of universal human rights.

This is not to say that Iran’s Islamic intellectuals and reform-minded Islamists have abandoned their religious worldviews for a more cosmopolitan or secular worldview. Rather, they are increasingly comfortable with moving in and out of and entwining the two. This is significant as the willingness of prominent Green Movement leaders with religious credentials to invoke universal human rights in effect discredits the regime’s traditional stance that human rights are nothing more than the product of Western cultural imperialism and Western political agendas.

Finally, it is important not to forget that the Green Movement’s human rights challenge over the last year has in fact forced the regime to make a number of concessions. At the end of July, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered the closure of Kahrizak prison where some of the most publicized torture and rape cases took place. One official stated that the prison had been closed because, “it lacked necessary conditions to preserve rights of detainees”. Further, after the public outcry over the rape cases, the reports of systematic rape of prisoners have died down considerably. Finally, although tainted with a significant degree of whitewashing, the government did form several commissions to investigate the alleged abuse, repeatedly backtracked on bogus attributions of victims’ cause of deaths, admitted that torture takes place in Iranian prisons and prosecuted individuals it said had been responsible for the abuses as a result of the Green Movement’s pressure.
While these gains are a far cry from the actual guarantee of rights to which large segments of the Iranian population have long aspired and the challenge of human rights in the face of state violence persists, these gains are significant nonetheless The Green movement has shifted the starting point of public discourse and prevailing assumptions about the Islamic Republic’s human rights practices and that provides openings for future challenges. If the attainment of human rights is understood as a longer-term process for which layers of foundation must by laid, the human rights struggle that took shape over the past year in Iran may be more accurately viewed as a critical stage in the evolution of human rights politics, consciousness and discourses in post-revolutionary Iran.

Shadi Mokhtari is a Washington DC-based independent scholar and attorney specializing in human rights and women’s rights issues in the Middle East. She is the author of After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and the Managing Editor of the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights.