Roxana Saberi, the American imprisoned in Iran for 100 days and released one year ago, writes in a new op-ed that those who wish to fight for change in Iran must raise human rights as a central issue. Unfortunately, her most concrete suggestion, namely using the United Nations Human Rights Council as a vehicle for such pressure is exactly where nothing will happen.
“As the international community focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, it should also make human rights a first-tier issue. When the UN Human Rights Council meets in Geneva next month, Washington and the European Union should lead calls for a resolution setting up a mechanism to investigate human rights atrocities in Iran during the past year. A bigger push should be made to send a UN special envoy on human rights to Iran and to aid Iranians, including the many journalists forced to flee their country out of fear of persecution.”
The UN Human Rights Council has never been the correct address for actually human rights crusading and recently it got a lot worse. Just ask Anne Bayefsky who keeps a close eye on the doings in Geneva. As she wrote recently, “Once upon a time, the United Nations was about protecting human rights and Eleanor Roosevelt was the chairman of its premier human rights agency, the Human Rights Commission. This week, the U.N.’s top human rights body, renamed the Human Rights Council, is poised to add Libya to its membership. Libya will be elected by the U.N. General Assembly through a secret ballot in a process that champions geographic and religious loyalties over anything remotely resembling the actual protection of human rights.”
Saberi urges ordinary people to do what they can to speak out about human rights abuses in Iran. But such efforts would be a lot more powerful and easier to promote if the current administration in Washington seemed the least bit interested in the topic. From President Obama’s lukewarm criticism of Iran’s stolen election last year, to the administration defunding of various Iranian human rights advocacy groups, to the current policy if not opposing inappropriate additions to the human rights council at the UN, the Obama administration has made it painfully clear that human rights abuses are of little concern. Saberi makes a strong case but the White House and State Department aren’t listening.