"Iran has Great Potential for Becoming a Democracy"

In 2003, Shirin Ebadi became the first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Ebadi had pursued a highly successful law career and was the first woman to become a judge in Iran. In 1979, she supported the overthrow of the Shah, but later wrote that after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in Iran, “It took scarcely a month for me to realize that, in fact, I had willingly and enthusiastically participated in my own demise.” Khomeini’s supporters banned women from working as judges, and demoted Ebadi to the role of “legal expert.” She took early retirement.

In the early 1990s, however, Ebadi re-built her legal career in the Islamic Republic, becoming a lawyer, and building a reputation for defending the rights of women and children, members of religious minorities, and activists and intellectuals targeted by the judiciary. In 2002, along with other prominent lawyers, she founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center. The center proved a great obstacle to a long-standing atmosphere of legal impunity in Iran, and Ebadi and her colleagues faced ever-escalating surveillance and official harassment until authorities forced it to close in 2008.

When authorities cracked down on Iran’s pro-democracy “Green Movement” in June 2009, Ebadi was lecturing in Spain. Though she had only planned a short trip, colleagues advised her not to return to Iran. Now, in Until We Are Free, her first book since her exile, Ebadi reflects on her efforts to promote human rights within the logic of Iran’s Islamic laws, challenges the authorities’ efforts to intimidate her and her family, and looks upon Iran’s prospects for a freer future. IranWire spoke to Ebadi about her memoir.

Many people view the human rights movement in Iran as a secular project, but in this book, you affirm your Muslim identity and understanding of Islam in relation to your work. Why is it important for you to communicate those things to readers?

The reason that I constantly emphasize that I am both a Muslim and a defender of human rights is to set straight those among my compatriots who think one must be either a Muslim or a defender of human rights. These two things do not contradict each other in any way. In fact, human rights are the essence of various cultures, religions and civilizations. We know that several Muslim jurists were involved in drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other conventions on human rights, and we also know that Muslim countries including Iran have accepted these conventions. In other words Iran, or actually the government of Iran, which considers itself Islamic and claims to be safeguarding Islam, has accepted these principles.

Then why, people ask, when they violate human rights, and objections are raised, do they immediately claim that these principles are contrary to Islamic laws? I emphasize my being a Muslim to show the people of Iran, and people around the world, that the Iranian government has a double standard. On one hand, it accepts the principles of human rights because in the international arena it cannot say otherwise, but on the other hand, it does not implement them, and uses the excuse that it is an Islamic government. I want to say that such excuses are without merit and nothing must stand in the way of implementing human rights principles in Iran. This is a double standard that the Iranian government must explain, but it has no explanation for it. In short, nothing must prevent the implementation of human rights in Iran. The government’s argument is merely an excuse.

After you were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, the celebrated reformist President Mohammad Khatami dismissed its value, saying that only the Nobel Prize for literature mattered. How do you think he saw your work?

This is a question Khatami himself must answer, not I. I can only say that the Defenders of Human Rights Center, which was the most important civil foundation in Iran for human rights, and supported many political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, started its work when Mr. Khatami was president. We filed an application to register and the application went through its legal process, but they refused to issue the necessary permit. This later gave Ahmadinejad and his people an excuse to say that it was not legally registered. They attacked the offices of the foundation and arrested many of my colleagues, some of whom are still in prison.

Reading about the lengths to which security officials went to harm your family life, and to use your love for other people against you, I kept thinking about how Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his followers portray themselves as defenders of the family as an institution. Are they aware of the contradiction between their stated values and tactics they use against their critics?

The way they treated my family and the troubles that they created for my spouse and my close relatives were not confined to my case. Many political and civil rights activists have met with the same fate, and their families have been treated the same way. Unfortunately, in some cases, this has led to the breakup of families who have been forced to live in places distant from each other.

Some of my clients had the same fate as my family. I told them consistently to talk and to disclose the illegal and the inhuman behavior of the Iranian government and its security agents. Unfortunately certain subjects are taboo in Iran and people are not willing to talk about the troubles that security agents create for them.

To break this taboo, I have spoken as loudly as possible so that both the people of Iran and the people of the world will know what dirty methods Iranian security agents use to achieve their illegal and inhuman goals.

You have a chapter in your book entitled “Bloodbath as Lesson” in which you write that Iran’s strong support for Bashar al-Assad in 2011 conveyed a message that any mass demonstrations in Iran would be similarly crushed. How has the spectacle of horror in Syria since 2011 — both the scale of killing and the refugee crisis — influenced the character and attitudes of Iranian reformers?

From the moment of the Syrian popular uprising, Iran sent both arms and military forces to Syria, and it told Lebanese Hezbollah to go and help Bashar al-Assad. It was the unjustified Iranian intervention that led to the Syrian Civil War.

Mr. Khamenei and the Iranian regime have repeatedly declared that keeping Bashar al-Assad is their “red line,” and that there are no circumstances under which they will allow Assad to be removed from power. This has put Syria through close to six years of misery. The government of Iran wants to keep Bashar al-Assad for political and strategic reasons because he has been a political puppet of Iran.

But it has also used the civil war in Syria for another purpose. Every night on all Iranian TV stations and on all channels, the government shows Iranians the tragic situation of the Syrian people to convince them that rising up against them would lead to the same thing. The Syrian situation has sapped the courage of the Iranian people to protest, because they know that if they rise up and the events of 2009 are repeated, the Iranian regime would do the same to them as they have done in Syria. For this reason, I believe that the Syrian civil war has had a very adverse effect on the democratization of Iran.

One of the big themes in your book is the pain of exile, which you experienced very suddenly and unexpectedly in 2009. What would need to change in Iran for you to consider returning?

I will return to Iran when I can continue my job as a defense attorney and a supporter of human rights. I will return to Iran when my colleagues are not in prison. I will return to Iran when the Defenders of Human Rights Center is reopened. Until then I will continue my activities outside Iran, which primarily consist of disclosing and explaining the problems of the Iranian people.

I use freedom of speech outside Iran so that the censored voice of the Iranian people can be heard by people around the world. But working in Iran as a human rights lawyer can only happen when democracy comes to Iran. We cannot predict an exact date for that because it depends on multiple variables. One variable is the general political landscape in the Middle East. Other variables include the interaction between Iran and the West and the international price of oil.

All these variables affect when democracy will take hold in Iran, but there is something that I believe in one hundred percent and that is that democracy will come to Iran because Iran has the potential for it. We have a good and active student movement. We have a courageous labor movement. We have a vast and powerful feminist movement. What is more, these movements cooperate with each other and listen to each other. Iran has great potential for becoming a democracy, but we cannot predict an exact date at this juncture.