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Features

Zarif’s Miserable Human Rights Track Record

March 3, 2019
Shahed Alavi
13 min read
Zarif has always tried to portray the Islamic Republic as a legitimate government that has been a victim of human rights violations
Zarif has always tried to portray the Islamic Republic as a legitimate government that has been a victim of human rights violations
Hossein Raeesi, an adjunct professor in human rights at Carleton University in Ottawa: “Zarif is well-aware of the violations of human rights in Iran”
Hossein Raeesi, an adjunct professor in human rights at Carleton University in Ottawa: “Zarif is well-aware of the violations of human rights in Iran”
Shahin Sadeghzadeh Milani, executive director at Iran Human Rights Documentation Center says officials from non-democratic countries often deny or justify human rights abuses
Shahin Sadeghzadeh Milani, executive director at Iran Human Rights Documentation Center says officials from non-democratic countries often deny or justify human rights abuses

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is now back at work after his shock resignation on February 25, has always maintained that the Islamic Republic upholds human rights and that he is strong advocate for them. In fact, when the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet asked him about the prison conditions of a group of detained environmentalists at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, he responded: “I am a professor of human rights,” adding that he had “taught” the subject “for more than 30 years.”

Although his comments sparked criticism and indignation, this assertion has been a fairly routine one for him. On March 14, 2016, in a speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, he said: “As someone who taught human rights when it was not fashionable to teach human rights in Iran, I believe that we can make a lot of improvements.” As Mani Mostofi, a human rights lawyer based in New York, points out, defending Iran’s human rights record is part of his job as foreign minister, and Zarif certainly sees it that way. Ass documented in Mohammad Mehdi Raji’s book Mr. Ambassador — a collection of interviews mostly conducted during Zarif’s time as ambassador to the UN — Zarif has been fond of discussing how popular he is among foreign diplomats, and points out the respect they have for him.

But Zarif’s confidence in his work and conduct as foreign minister was undermined by the controversial February 25 meeting between the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani, and General Ghasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force — a meeting to which he was not invited. “After the photographs of today’s meeting, Zarif said that he no longer has any credibility in the world as foreign minister,” one website reported [Persian link]. 

Considering Zarif’s record in justifying human rights abuses and lying about them, did Iranian public opinion (and that of the wider world) ever really find him credible? Doesn’t this behavior make any of his claims less credible to the diplomatic community?

 

Playing the Victim

Mani Mostofi, a human rights lawyer based in New York, explains why human rights is off limits for any Iranian official. “Human rights is a red line for the Islamic Republic, and Iran has concluded that it must not cooperate with the international community under any circumstances. In this area, they are not willing to take even one step forward because they believe that if they show any flexibility in human rights they will lose in the domestic arena.”

When meeting dignitaries and officials outside Iran, Zarif has regularly either justified or denied human rights abuses in Iran, including denying that the country has any prisoners of conscience or political prisoners. He opts to deal with the human rights question within the framework of what might be called “diplomatic answers.” If he doesn’t deny claims, he simply avoids answering questions or tries to deflect them, and he often casts Iran as a victim of human rights violations. This was his tactic at a meeting of the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, which is concerned with social, humanitarian and cultural issues, when he used the allegory of the “Wolf and the Seven Young Goats” to portray the United States as the big bad wolf and Iran as one of its innocent victims.

Zarif has used other tactics to cover up human rights abuses carried out by the Islamic Republic. In some cases, he has explained that the judiciary is an independent branch of government and therefore answering questions about unjust prosecutions at the Revolutionary Courts or trumped-up charges set out by security agencies against defenders of human rights and political prisoners is the business of the judiciary, not the executive branch.

For example, when in a phone conversation [Persian link] in November 2017, Boris Johnson, then the British Foreign Secretary, and Zarif talked about the prison sentence of the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British media charity worker, Zarif reminded him that in the Iranian system, there is a separation of powers, and that it was up to the judiciary to decide her fate. However, he promised to talk about it with the judicial authorities as a “humanitarian” issue.

But Hossein Raeesi, a former lawyer in Iran and currently an adjunct professor in human rights at Carleton University in Ottawa, says: “Naturally, in all cases that involve violations of international laws and the human rights obligations of Iran, it is the Iranian government that is questioned and the foreign ministry cannot use the excuse of the separation of powers to shirk the responsibility for providing truthful and accurate answers.”

Raeesi adds that, as the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif is well aware of the violations of human rights in Iran, and the commitments Iran has within the framework of UN conventions it has signed. “But when he cannot or does not want to give a clear and truthful answer to a question about human right abuses in Iran, he cheats to wriggle out of giving a clear answer.” 

He also points out that just because Zarif has taught human rights does not mean that he has developed the necessary compassion for human rights. “Judging from Mr. Zarif’s behavior he has not internalized human rights, has no sensitivity towards human rights, is not loyal to the principles of human rights and does take a clear position in regards to the violations of human rights,” he says. And Shahin Sadeghzadeh Milani, executive director at the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), says these denials and evasions undermine his academic credibility and make his “professional ethics questionable.”

 

“I Know Nothing About it”

He has also sometimes resorted to claiming no knowledge about various cases. For example, in an interview with the Daily Beast on October 9, 2013, Zarif was asked: “When will Majid Tavakoli, one of Iran’s most prominent student leaders and political prisoners, be free?” he said, with what the Daily Beast reporter described as a straight face: “I don’t know him.” The only prisoner of conscious that he conceded having heard about was Nasrin Sotoudeh — but only, he said, “because of the media.”

A few months later, on March 21, 2014, during a closed-door meeting with members of the Austrian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Zarif went even further. He denied the execution of political prisoners in Iran even though Ahmed Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights in Iran at the time, had presented a report detailing instances of such executions. One member of the parliament gave her account of Zarif’s attitude when she asked him about human rights in Iran: “He did not have a negative view on the situation in his country but noted that human rights can still be improved everywhere.” When another Austrian politician asked about political executions, Zarif again denied it. “He said a clear no, this does not happen ... Maybe it may seem sometimes [that way] but political dissidence never is a reason for the death penalty,” the parliamentarian recalls him saying.

“Not all governments are like Israel, the United States, Bahrain or Iran — that would accuse the critic of lying or double standards the moment that somebody criticizes the situation of human rights in their countries,” Mani Mostofi says. Some countries actually respond to UN and other organizations’ reports on human rights by asking for support to implement change. “It is true that Iran is not the only country that uses this tactic and all countries in the world defend themselves in this regard to a degree, but not at the level of Iran and with the same method.”

Milani says that denying or justifying abuses of human rights is commonplace among officials of most countries with non-democratic systems. But in democratic countries,” he says, “ the rule of the law, a free press and the public opinion do not allow the government to justify violations of human rights. For example, when the Abu Gharib Prison scandal became public through the media, American government officials were forced to accept responsibility and to be held accountable for it.”

 

“We do not jail people for their opinions”

On other occasions, Zarif has taken a more aggressive stance, portraying prisoners of conscience as common criminals who try to hide behind their alleged professions. In an interview with US television journalist Charlie Rose for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) on April 29, 2015, Zarif said: “We do not jail people for their opinions. ... But people who commit crimes, who violate the laws of a country, cannot hide behind being a journalist or being a political activist. People have to observe the law” [Video].

Zarif was widely criticized for these remarks. The imprisoned journalist Bahman Ahmadi Amouei challenged him in a letter, giving his own story of abuse [Persian link]. He then posted on Facebook that Zarif had been referring in the interview to Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was at the time imprisoned in Iran on charges including espionage and propaganda against the regime.

However, this scandal simply prompted Zarif to change tactics again. A few days later, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel at his office in Tehran, Zarif said: “I think the UN special rapporteur has been less than credible in dealing with Iran” and added that claims of human rights abuses in Iran were actually “political propaganda” against the elected government of Rouhani. But then he appeared to leave himself some room to maneuver, and said: “I think one of the priorities for this government is to improve the human rights situation. I cannot claim that Iran has a perfect human rights record.”

But Zarif has always been more cautious when talking to Iranian human rights activists who live outside Iran. When Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the spokesperson for the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) organization, asked him about violations of human rights on June 18, 2016 at the  Peace Research Institute Oslo, Zarif said: “If people were so dissatisfied as you say they are, they wouldn't have participated in such huge numbers...People can go to Iran and see for themselves how our youth are operating and how our youth are conducting their lives. ... So, I hope that you can change your glasses and look at Iran again.”

 

UN Mechanisms as “Political Campaign Against Iran”

It didn’t take long for Zarif to become aggressive again, and to completely deny that Iran was violating the human rights of any of its citizens. On April 23, 2018, addressing the American Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he said: “No Baha’i individual is in prison for the crime of being a Baha’i. ... We do not recognize somebody as a Baha’i, as a religion, but that’s a belief. Somebody can be agnostic, somebody can be an atheist. We don’t ... take them to prison because they are an atheist.” He also said that hijab is part of Iranian culture.

On the persecution of homosexuals, he said: “We do not, again, punish or criminalize anybody for their activity at home. What is important is what they do in the street, what they do in the society, and we have a different set of norms than Western societies when it comes to sexual preferences — exhibited in the streets; not in their personal lives.”

These statements led to a wave of criticism on social networks and thousands of people posted on Twitter in both Persian and English using the hashtag #zariflies.

Although Mostofi acknowledges it’s Zarif’s job as foreign minister to defend his country’s policies at the international level, he says it is not necessary for him to lie. “Zarif can say, ‘I know that we have human rights problems in Iran and my government is trying hard to solve these problems by getting closer to the international community,’” he says. “Then he could mention similar problems in other countries.” However, Mostofi says Zarif does this to some degree — Zarif certainly highlights violations in other countries, he says. But he still resorts to the full range of tactics when talking about human rights.

Shahin Sadeghzadeh Milani agrees that Zarif does not need to lie. “What strikes me as strange are not lies told by the Iranian foreign minister but the justification of these lies by those who have no official responsibility but feel that they have a duty to justify Zarif’s lies about violations of human rights in Iran,” Milani says. 

Zarif did not respond to the #zariflies campaign. But in his subsequent visits and whenever the subject of human rights came up, he repeated his earlier assertions in a more cautious way. In a meeting in November 2018 with Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the former president of Chile, Zarif denounced any arbitrary issuance of human rights resolutions against the Islamic Republic. He expressed regret over the use of the concept of human rights and the abuse of the UN’s human rights mechanism as a means of exerting pressure on independent states. Zarif and other officials have asserted that those people who insist on focusing on human rights violations are engaging in a political campaign against Iran and their claims are therefore invalid.

“Zarif has been aggressive in trying to push questions about human rights abuses in Iran to the sidelines by complaining against the international system, by magnifying violations in other countries and by accusing human rights organizations and other countries of double standards for human rights,” says Mostofi. 

 

Not a Dictatorship

A few days on from Zarif’s meeting with Michelle Bachelet, on December 14, 2018, he adopted a different approach when he addressed the 4th Congress of the Iranian reformist NEDA Party. “Observing human rights is a necessity for our country’s survival, not a moral and religious question.” And, a few days after this, on December 22, 2018, in an interview [Persian link] with the French weekly Le Point, he claimed that Iran was not a dictatorship where only one person talks; rather, he said, it is a democracy like France where people can express different views on different issues.

Perhaps Zarif’s 10-year record as the foreign ministry’s deputy for legal and international affairs and as a guest professor at Tehran University’s School of Law and Social Sciences has given him the self-confidence to call himself “a professor of human rights” — although it's only possible to identify one case where he helped a Master’s Degree student who was writing his dissertation. But he had never lost his temper the way he did in his last interview before announcing his resignation. During that interview, Zarif refused to say anything about the violations of human rights in Iran. 

Zarif has always insisted that Iran is a stable country and the Islamic Republic is a legitimate government that enjoys the support of the people. 

A few days on from Zarif’s announcement, President Rouhani refused to accept his resignation. But that does not change the obvious reality: that the policy of violating human rights in Iran and the denials of the Iranian foreign minister and other Iranian officials will continue. It happened just a few days ago, during the 40th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. On that occasion, Laya Joneydi, Rouhani’s Vice President for Legal Affairs, criticized the west extensively without uttering a word about human rights in Iran.

 

 

Related Coverage:

Zarif’s Economic Legacy, February 26, 2019

End of an Era?: Iran Awaits Fallout from Zarif's Resignation, February 26, 2019

Zarif Resigns, February 25, 2019

Foreign Minister Zarif: What Baha’i Prisoners?, April 27, 2018

Journalists! Ask Zarif About These Iranian Prisoners!, September 21, 2016

Scourge of Hypocrites or Master of Distraction? September 13, 2016

How to Talk to Javad Zarif About Human Rights, September 12, 2016

Zarif's Lies Are No Surprise, May 2, 2015

No Prisoners of Conscience!? Really?, May 1, 2015

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