Scourge of Hypocrites or Master of Distraction? How Javad Zarif Talks About Human Rights

Ever since Iranian President Hassan Rouhani appointed Mohammad Javad Zarif foreign minister in September 2013, the Islamic Republic has put forth one of its more urbane and measured spokesmen since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.  A US-educated career diplomat who represented Iran at the United Nations from 2002 to 2007, Zarif speaks the jargon of international relations in practiced English, and keeps to a tight script. His successful efforts to win Iran a settlement over its nuclear program with the US and other powers have won him a reputation as a man with whom the West can do business. And while Zarif is most comfortable talking about Iran’s role in the Middle East, he has also put a new spin on the Islamic Republic’s weakest subject: its human rights record.

Whereas other English Speaking Iranian officials – notably Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of the Iranian judiciary’s Human Rights Council – have spoken bluntly about Iran’s rejection of liberal democratic norms or the notion of universal human rights, Zarif approaches the question more subtly, extending apparent concessions about Iran’s own failings, while inviting doubt about the good faith or good sense of Iran’s accusers.

 

So what innovations has Zarif brought to Iran’s human rights rhetoric? Below are a few key strategies.

 

 

1. Zarif has toned down Iran’s “denial mode.”

 

After eight years of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran-watchers grew weary of a predictable pattern of bluster and denial on just about every human rights question. For many of them, Zarif has proved a refreshing change. “His biggest innovation has been that he has admitted — probably for the first time for a high Iranian official — that Iran’s record is both not perfect and that Iran needs to work to improve in that area,” says Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American journalist closely acquainted with Zarif. When speaking at the European Parliament in February, for example, Zarif said, “I am not saying our human rights record does not need improvement, far from it. We believe that human rights can take a lot of improvement, and that is the best area where you can add legitimacy and increase the stability of the government.”

Zarif is not, however, entirely immune from denial. In April 2015, he was widely pilloried by Iranian human rights defenders and former political prisoners for telling PBS host Charlie Rose, “We do not jail people for their opinions.”

 

2. Zarif portrays himself as a universalist.

 

Iran’s critics often challenge Iran’s apparent rejection of universal principles as laid out in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which Iran signed in 1948. Iran, they often point out, subordinates many of those principles to Islamic laws. But Zarif argues that he, in fact, is the universalist, whereas other countries engage in a corrupt and selective human rights process. Zarif rejects country-specific measures related to Iran’s human rights situation, such as the yearly vote on the resolution titled, “On the Situation of Human Rights in Iran,” and the appointment of a “special rapporteur” for human rights in Iran. Instead, he favors the Universal Periodic Review, whereby the UN Human Rights Council reviews the human rights records of all 193 UN member states on an equal basis. Speaking at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in June, Zarif described himself “as someone who agrees with universal values that are reflected in human rights.” He went on to argue that some universal values emanate from Islamic culture, such as the idea of accepting equality under the dominance of “another being.” What that being makes of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is, of course, an open question.

 

3. Zarif is a master of “whataboutism”

 

The term “whataboutism” emerged during the Cold War to describe the rhetorical strategy of Soviet officials who, when challenged over such specific questions as the imprisonment of Russian dissidents or martial law in Poland, would deliver an icy counterblast of global context, highlighting abuses by a western critic’s own government or that government’s perceived allies. Zarif, too, is adept at whataboutism. He is especially fond of highlighting the West’s relative lack of interest in freedoms in neighboring countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Iran, he often says, has an elected government, whereas Saudi Arabia does not. Speaking to the European Parliament in February, he asked why Iran was under EU human rights sanctions while “the country that is bombing the hell out of Yemen” (i.e. Saudi Arabia) was not.

Perhaps more historically-minded than his western counterparts, Zarif is also keen to remind Europeans of their preference for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. “I saw the time when the Saddam Hussein regime of Iraq was one of the proponents of human rights in Iran, and was voting alongside the European Union against Iran,” he told the European Parliament.

 

4. Zarif links western concepts of human rights to western social problems

 

Zarif has implied that Sunni jihadist terrorism in the West is a byproduct of western liberalism. Referring to ISIS in the course of a speech at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Zarif said, “Sometimes I ask, why is it that some of these criminals who are beheading innocent human beings in Syria and Iraq speak English and French with native accents? Were they the products of dictatorships in our region, or were they the products of so-called liberal democracies?” Such lacunae in the western worldview, he argues, should provide the basis for a “serious discussion” of human rights between Iran and the West, rather than mere western preaching.  But he doesn’t go into much detail. Is he saying that the West should restrict immigration from potential trouble spots, or afford terror suspects less in the way of due process? It’s anyone’s guess.

Zarif took on western liberal self-perception once again when he spoke at the New Zealand Institute of Foreign Affairs in Wellington in March. Responding to a question about Iranian asylum seekers whom Australia had detained in an effort to force them to return to Iran, Zarif described them in the same terms as the Australian government — as likely economic migrants. He said Australians should be more cautious about how they portray Iran. “We’ve got to be careful about what we preach,” he said. “If we propagate that in Iran everyone’s rights are being trampled upon, and [that] we are protectors of these rights, then we are inviting people to lie about their situation, and to try to gain somebody’s compassion.”

 

5. Zarif manages to dodge the really hot topics – albeit clumsily

 

Zarif’s infamous appearance on Charlie Rose last April showed that he speaks more effectively about human rights as a vague ideal than about specifics. As soon as Rose pressed him about the case of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter then imprisoned on ill-defined charges, Zarif made his gaffe about Iran not imprisoning people for their opinions. Zarif dug himself in deeper when he added that, “People who commit crimes...cannot hide behind being a journalist or being a political activist.” To western ears, he was clearly alluding to any number of recent political imprisonments, and not just the one Rose had asked him about.

In June 2016, Zarif displayed his weakness for specifics once again when Mahmoud Amiry-Moghaddam of Iran Human Rights challenged him at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs over Iran’s recent increase in drug-related executions. Zarif fumbled, resorting to a flippant, scripted talking point about Iran’s high voter turnout, and clumsily accused Moghaddam – an Iranian himself – of “Iran-phobic depiction of Iran.”

 

So What Next?

 

“Zarif basically responds through manipulation,” says Amiry-Moghaddam, reflecting on his encounter with Zarif. “The bottom line is that President Rouhani became president mainly because of his promises to improve the human rights situation, but that situation hasn't improved, and in many cases it has gotten worse. Human rights are the main issue Zarif should be confronted with.”

As IranWire observed in an earlier article about Zarif and human rights, no journalist has yet conducted a truly great interview with Zarif on the subject. Any journalist fortunate enough to question Zarif when he attends the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this week might consider asking him about the imprisonment of lawyer Narges Mohammadi for her peaceful activism, or about the apparently arbitrary five-year sentence handed to British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe last week. They ought to ask, too, about why Iran bars members of its largest religious minority – the Baha’is – from post-secondary education. Or, if they want to show Zarif that their historical memory goes back as far as his does, they can ask, with reference to the recent release of an audio recording by the late Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, how he now regards Iran’s execution thousands of political prisoners 1988. Would Zarif’s views on these vital matters really differ much from those of Iran’s ever-derided “hardliners”?