Citizens’ Rights in Iran, Part 6: Failed Reforms

July 5, 2016

55 min read

In 1997, Iranians elected their first reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. But, although it was a time of hope, the Khatami era was marked by numerous violations of citizen’s rights.

This video series on citizens’ rights in Iran explores through interviews with experts and witnesses the ways in which Iran has protected or breached those rights since it signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1968.

This episode looks at efforts President Khatami (1997-2005) and the reformist-dominated Sixth Parliament (2000-2004) made to guarantee citizens’ rights in the face of opposition from Iran’s Guardian Council and security forces’ attacks on Iranian civil society.

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Ali Afshari, a former leader of the pro-Khatami Office for Strengthening Unity and former political prisoner, talks about how student and reform movements overestimated the powers of Iran’s elected bodies, and of Khatami himself. They had hoped Khatami could neutralize Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s conservative vision of society through popular support for reform, and had mistakenly believed that Khamenei would compromise with reformists’ demands. Afshari says Khamenei instead used his influence on the conservative Fifth Parliament to interfere in the political process. He also discusses the violent fundamentalist movement Ansar Hezbollah, the extra-judicial murders of dissidents at the hands of intelligence officials, and reformists’ failure to amend Iran’s censorious Press Law.

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Ali-Akbar Mousavi Khoeini, a reformist in the Sixth Parliament and former political prisoner, talks about paradoxes in the Iranian Constitution regarding the power and responsibilities of the president. While presidents are responsible for upholding the constitution, he says, they don’t have the executive powers they need for such a duty, and can only issue constitutional cautions. Khatami relied on a committee of human rights experts to issue private and public cautions to government institutions. He also ordered limited changes of attitude and procedure in various ministries to encourage better protection of citizens’ rights. Mousavi Khoeini says the Khatami administration struggled to prioritize its demands and organize its supporters.

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Omid Memarian, a journalist and former political prisoner, talks about being illegally detained by Iran’s security forces, who tortured him and forced him to make a false public confession based on a conspiracy theory. He also recounts the power struggle between hardliners and reformists, and his subsequent decision to leave Iran.

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Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, a professor of international law and a former adviser to Iranian opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi, describes the efforts of the Supervising Committee for the Execution of the Constitution to prepare the National Plan of Education on Human Rights for Khatami’s office. The plan called for civil rights education on a national scale, beginning with schools and universities, but the committee encountered opposition over the phrase “human rights” since “certain groups” would inevitably attack it. Many reformist goals such as free access to information, wider distribution of power, greater civil rights, and free political parties and a free press, fell afoul of entrenched conservative interests.

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Shirin Ebadi, human rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate, talks about the Sixth Parliament’s adoption of international treaties including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention against Torture, both of which the Guardian Council vetoed. She describes her discovery of evidence that intelligence agents had planned to kill her along with other dissidents, and recalls Iranian reformists’ reactions to her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.

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In 2001, Iranian journalist Siamak Pourzand was arrested, detained and tortured by security agents. In this video, Pourzand's wife, Mehrangiz Kar, a lawyer and human rights activist, describes his ordeal, which led to his suicide. She recalls how her husband became a pawn in a conservative scheme to undermine reformists, and was forced to falsely confess that he had received money from abroad to distribute amongst Iran’s reformist newspapers.