Comment: Maldives should honor its history by supporting the rights of the Iranian people
17 Dec 2013, 1:08 PM
Dokhi Fassihian
In the coming days, the United Nations General Assembly will adopt a human rights resolution passed last month by its humanitarian committee aimed at improving the lives of Iran’s citizens. The human rights conditions of Iranians have been abysmal for three decades now.
This includes entrenched political repression, state-sanctioned gender and religious discrimination, and institutionalised violence and torture of government critics. Today, nearly a thousand political prisoners and prisoners of conscience languish in Iranian prisons due to the exercise of their guaranteed rights to expression, conscience, and religion.
While newly elected President Hassan Rouhani has provided hope to Iranians who voted him in on a platform of citizens’ rights, limits to presidential power are already undercutting his administration’s ability to usher in the human rights reforms he promised during his campaign for president. Policymaking in Iran also rests with unelected officials, so for Rouhani to advance his reform agenda, support from Iran’s Supreme Leader is necessary. What the Iranian people desperately need, therefore, and what President Rouhani can benefit from, is sustained and elevated attention to their situation. This will help Iran’s entire leadership understand that episodic or cosmetic steps will not be accepted as a substitute for genuine, broad-based democratic human rights reforms.
Yet, when the vote on this issue was called at the United Nations in November, the Maldives’ seat was empty. This is all the more astonishing since the Maldives, itself, recently emerged from authoritarianism following its first multi-party elections in 2008. Meanwhile, the Maldives asked the UN General Assembly not once, but twice, to be elected to the Human Rights Council. It was the UN that called attention to a lack of gender equality in the Maldives’ judicial appointments, which helped the Maldives end gender discrimination within the judiciary, leading to the appointments of the country’s first-ever female judges. In Iran, female judges were unjustly removed from the bench after the 1979 revolution. They should be returned to their rightful posts.
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