Podcast: The Brazilian Human Rights Shock (script)

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You’re listening to Iran’s Weekly Wire; I’m Roland Elliott Brown.

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Iranian human rights defenders often feel besieged in their own country. But they can always take heart that their cause has gone global.

Earlier this month, Iran was at the center of a debate on the other side of the world--in the National Congress of Brazil.

The controversy focused on Brazil’s gesture of  support for Iran at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Back in March, Brazil shocked human rights defenders by abstaining from a vote to renew the mandate of Ahmed Shaheed. He’s the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Iran.

Iran wants to end Shaheed’s mandate. And Iran seems to have convinced Brazilian diplomats that its human rights situation is getting better, not worse.

But Brazilians who really care about human rights in Iran aren’t buying it.

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Mani Mostofi, from the US-based human rights group Impact Iran, brought this story to IranWire’s attention.

Since this story is about how the UN deals with human rights, I asked him to explain the role of the UN’s special rapporteurs.

[Mani Mostofi] Ahmed Shaheed is the current holder of the mandate of UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights  in the Islamic Republic of Iran. What a special rapporteur does generally is to monitor human rights situations, report these situations to the human rights bodies, particularly the human rights council, which is the main UN body which monitors human rights. What this special rapporteur did was write bi-annual reports on the situation of human rights in Iran and cover a range of topics, whether it's women's rights, free expression, the arrests of human rights defenders and journalists. The special rapporteur has done a lot of work on the death penalty because Iran’s use of the death penalty in contravention of international law skyrocketed under his tenure, people being executed for crimes that you are not supposed to be able to be executed for, people being executed without a fair trial. So that’s a lot of what the special rapporteur’s focused on.

The UN assigns country-specific special rapporteurs to countries where there are urgent or chronic human rights problems.

There are 14 country-specific rapporteurs assigned to trouble spots around the world.  Examples include Somalia, Syria, North Korea, and the Palestinian Territories.

The UN added Iran to the list in 2011. But Iran resents having a special rapporteur assigned its case.

[Mani Mostofi] The Iranian government has naturally been extremely--I shouldn't say naturally, it shouldn’t be a natural thing, the Iranian government should see this as an opportunity--but they have been extremely hostile to the special rapporteur. That's not atypical of countries that receive these country specific mandates, they think it's based on bias within the Human Rights Council, and they don't think it has anything to do with their actual records, but in reality it does, it's not a coincidence that this special rapporteur was created after the events of 2009 when the number of arrests and repression of civil society activists and human rights defenders skyrocketed, and in a lot of ways continues today in slightly different forms.

So where does Brazil fit into all this?

Brazil and Iran aren’t often mentioned in the same breath.

The last time the two countries were in the news together was in 2010.

That was when Brazil and Turkey jointly proposed a solution to the nuclear dispute between Iran and the major powers. The US rejected it.

Brazil’s president at the time, Lula Da Silva, was friendly to Iran. Notably, he provided Iran diplomatic cover on human rights questions at the UN.

When his successor, Dilma Rousseff, came to office in 2011, she vowed to change that.

Rousseff was a political prisoner under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. She had been badly tortured in prison, and she criticised Da Silva’s attitude to Iran.

Here’s Mani Mostofi:

[Mani Mostofi] When the current Brazilian president was running for office, she made a pledge that she would break with her predecessor, President Lula and his policies toward abstaining on resolutions around human rights in Iran. What happened right after she was elected, there was a resolution put forward at the Human Rights Council in Geneva to create this special rapporteur position. That gave Brazil an opportunity to become a strong supporter of this resolution, and not only have they voted yes on it for several years in a row, the entire time they were at the Human Rights Council, but they were also vocal supporters of it. They publicly encouraged the Iranian government to cooperate with the special rapporteur. They would raise concerns for Iran's treatment of Baha’is, of journalists and human rights defenders, Iran's lack of commitment to eliminating gender based violence.

But every year, members of the Human Rights Council have to vote on whether to extend the rapporteur’s mandate.

Brazil had always voted “yes” after 2011. But this year, they abstained.

Brazilian diplomats issued a rather unconvincing statement to explain why.

They said they abstained because Iran had accepted some UN recommendations, and had renewed its engagement with the UN’s human rights system.

Brazil expressed hopes that Iran’s recent moves would translate into effective measures to protect human rights. But they didn’t cite any measurable improvements.

Even so, there were still enough votes to keep Ahmed Shaheed in his job. But people who watch human rights in Iran were alarmed by Brazil’s sudden shift.

Here’s Hadi Ghaemi. He’s the director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. I asked him about the consequences of Brazil’s abstention.

[Hadi Ghaemi] Remember that these things are trends within the UN mechanism. Every vote is actually a precursor to a future vote, so abstention in March 2015 is very troubling, because Brazil may very well argue in March 2016, when the annual renewal comes up, to change its vote even to a worse direction, from abstention to “no.” That could have serious consequences, by rallying other countries of the south to follow suit, and that could put the entire mandate in jeopardy.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner, also weighed in. She published an op-ed in a Brazilian newspaper, Folha de São Paulo.

She wrote that five years ago, President Rousseff inspired hope by criticising the old style of Brazilian diplomacy. But now, she said, Rousseff has gone back on her commitments.

She reminded Rousseff that Iran is still the country that executes the most prisoners per capita. She said Iran has executed more people this year than in the each of the past 12 years.

She also asked what many rights groups are asking: “In light of all this, why did President Rousseff remove her support for the mandate?”

Human rights groups in Brazil are trying to find out.

I spoke to Camila Asano, who works for the Brazilian human rights group Conectas. Conectas looked into the story using Brazil’s new freedom of information law.

[Camila Asano] Since my organization Conectas Human Rights wasn’t at all satisfied w this explanation of vote we tried to understand better what are the reasons for this abstention from Brazil. Since 2012 we have this Freedom of Information Act. so we used this Freedom of Information Act to ask for the cables that was exchanged among the Brazilian Embassy in Tehran, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia, and the Brazil mission in Geneva that was in charge of voting in the resolution.

While Conectas couldn’t get hold of all the documents, the ones they did see told a story of Iranian government lobbying. The big player there was a famous Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Javad Larijani:

[Camila Asano] Those cables that are unclassified, so we could have access, they show that the Iranian government explicitly asks the Brazilian government to vote against the resolution or to abstain in the resolution. Then in this cable there is a copy of a document  like a dossier, presented by Larijani showing, according to the Iranian government, how the situation is now. So based on this decision of abstaining the resolution is accepting a demand from the Iranian government and is based on pieces of information provided by the human rights council headed by Larijani.

Now, the human rights council headed by Larijani is actually a branch of the Iranian judiciary. It’s called The High Council for Human Rights.

One of Larijani’s main jobs is to explain Iran’s position on human rights issues.

I tried calling Larijani for this podcast, but I couldn’t reach him.

You can get a pretty good idea of his views from an interview he gave to euronews last November.

This is what he said when euronews asked him about the criticism Iran gets, both from the UN Human Rights Council, and from independent human rights groups.

[Mohammad Javad Larijani] I think that Iran right now is targeted, I mean is falling victim of  another new kind of terrorism. I call it media and political terrorism. In the Council, if you look to the number of people who talked about Iran, over 100 states expressed their views about Iran. Something around like 50 states, which are the United States and Europeans mostly, they criticised Iran. And the rest, which are over 70, they were very sympathetic with Iran. For us the world is not the United States and Britain and France [...] The governments who are criticising us, it is quite apparent that there is a quite political structured criticism in here, politically manipulated.

So I asked Mani Mostofi if there is any truth to Larijani’s claim that it’s usually biased, western countries that criticise Iran at the UN at the Human Rights Council.

[Mani Mostofi] I really don't know what Human Rights Council Larijani is talking about because it tends to be that criticism of Iran is cross-regional and concern is cross-regional. Even countries, say, as friendly as Ecuador to Iran, will still often make statements over the fact that they have concern over Iran’s use of the death penalty, for example. And I think this criticism of the council, and of one bloc within the council having a bias, is actually ironically very similar to the criticism Israel has of the council which is that the Islamic countries, the organization of Islamic countries have a bias against Israel and they steer the council's behaviour in one direction. So I think what Larijani really needs to be responding to is whether or not the allegations made against Iran's human rights record are legitimate or not, and not whether there is a sense of selectivity involved in it because I think selectivity can never happen if the human rights situation wasn't that grave.

In the same interview Larijani also implied that independent human rights groups, like Amnesty International, are imposing their own cultural biases:

[Mohammad Javad Larijani] The second point comes to what is called NGOs. There is the second point in the criticism against us. And this is overlooking differences. Our experience in the last 35 years is to create a political and civil structure, a polity as you call it in English, based on Islamic rationality, which is democratic, but it is not liberal, it is not secular.

I asked Mani Mostofi about that, too.

[Mani Mostofi] The other thing we have to keep in mind is that Iran is only being held accountable to international human rights treaties that it is a wilful member of. So this is not some sort of foreign-imposed standard, this is the standard that the Iranian government signs onto and continues to claim to be beholden to legally under international law. So when  we talk about things like freedom from torture, and Larijani complains that there is some western conspiracy to criticise them for torture based on some arbitrary set of values, these aren't arbitrary values, these aren't western values, these are universal norms which Iran has agreed are universal norms.

Still, Larijani’s arguments appear to have gone some way with Brazil’s diplomats. Brazilian civil society, on the other hand, has its doubts. Here’s Camila Asano.

[Camila Asano] The fact that the Brazilian National Congress convened to hear this, to discuss the abstention shows that there is not enough support in the Brazilian state for this abstention, or at least the explanation of vote provided by the Brazilian diplomacy wasn't enough to convince us here. So I think it was quite positive to see this reaction of the legislative branch in calling executive branch to explain this. The other positive thing is to see the reaction of Brazilian society in a more broad way.

And Brazil may be especially well-positioned to influence Iran, precisely because it’s a powerful, non-western country. Here’s Mani Mostofi again.

[Mani Mostofi] Brazil doesn't understand its own influence when it comes to Iran, because Brazil is really a country that can support all the resolutions at the UN that Iran does not like, and still have an active engaged relationship with the government where they can sit down and talk about issues and try to figure out a way that Brazil can assist the Iranian government in human rights reforms. They can have that kind of rel and at the same time endorse these resolutions, and it’s because of who they are, because they are, a big strong influential, global south, South American government, and the Iranian government is not in a position to isolate itself from that type of ally. And it wouldn't. So Brazil can send a strong message and lend a helping hand at the same exact time.

Brazil and Iran may seem worlds apart. But next year in Geneva, the rights of Iranian citizens may depend on the workings of Brazilian democracy.

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That’s all from Iran’s Weekly Wire. To find out more about stories like this, join us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit IranWire.com.