Why Obama Should Highlight Iran's Human Rights Abuses

SARAH MORGAN and ANDREW APOSTOLOU are, respectively, Senior Program Associate and Director for Iran at Freedom House. Apostolou also co-chairs Beyond Sanctions: The Next Iran Strategy, a joint policy task force between Freedom House and the Progressive Policy Institute.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the United States has vacillated between engagement and confrontation with the Islamic Republic, with sanctions filling the gap. As Iran has moved closer to achieving its nuclear ambitions in recent years, tensions are rising once again. The latest round of U.S. sanctions, signed into law in 2010, has hurt the Iranian government by restricting finance for oil refineries and discouraging foreign companies from conducting business with it. Yet sanctions have not delayed Iran’s nuclear drive, foiled its support for terrorism abroad, or kept it from meddling in its neighbors’ affairs.

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In the wake of revelations about an Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Abdel al-Jubeir, some in Congress are making the case for another round of sanctions, ostensibly to ramp up the pressure even more. But such a strategy leaves much to be desired. Over the past year, for example, Iran has enacted economic reforms and reduced the price of subsidies, riding out and adapting to sanctions.

Washington will only neutralize Iran by exploiting the regime's main vulnerability: its false claim to legitimacy. The ayatollahs' hold on power is inherently unstable because they have no popular mandate. Since staging a rigged election in 2009 to keep Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, they have relied on repression and brutality to silence opposition, jailing journalists, torturing detainees, and executing critics (both real and imagined). By highlighting these crimes on the world stage and actively supporting Iran’s dissidents, the United States can place a new, more effective kind of pressure on Tehran and support the movement for democratic change from within. Focusing on human rights violations will allow the United States to expose the hypocrisy of the regime and remind Iran of its domestic troubles as it tries to expand its power and influence.

The current state of affairs in Iran began with the Green Movement uprising in 2009. As hundreds of thousands flowed into the streets to protest the sham victory of Ahmadinejad in the nation’s presidential election, security forces cracked down, worsening the country’s already severe level of oppression. The Iranian authorities admit to having arrested more than 4,500 protesters during the crackdown. Opposition groups report that there are at least 1,000 political prisoners still in jail, reflecting Iran’s long-practiced tactics of attempting to break dissidents with prolonged imprisonment and isolation and by harassing their families.

Iran has the highest per-capita execution rate in the world, with 252 confirmed executions in 2010 and reports of 300 more (out of a population of over 70 million). In absolute numbers, that is second only to China. And there has been no reprieve in 2011. Official Iranian media and human rights groups report 450 executions this year, many conducted in secret, unannounced to the lawyers and relatives of the accused. There have been 33 public executions so far this year; three men have been hanged for being homosexuals, a capital crime in Iran. In September alone, the state executed more than 100 of its citizens.

Those who fight back often end up arrested, too. One such case is Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian lawyer who has represented juveniles on death row for over a decade and, more recently, defended several prominent human rights activists. She was arrested in September 2010 for “acting against national security” and “propaganda against the regime” and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. When Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, and their two small children visited her in jail recently, they were detained for five hours because Khandan would not hand over his notebook to the authorities before the visit.

Some may argue that exposing Iran’s human rights record is a poor means of undermining the its regime. But it is actually sound statecraft. At little cost, the United States can mobilize international condemnation of Iran’s oppression more effectively than it can unite countries against Iran’s nuclear program, which is a far more contentious issue.

Consider the left-wing parties in Europe, such as Germany’s Green and Britain’s Labour, whose mantra before the 2009 elections was, in effect, “no war against Iran.” After the Iranian regime beat its own people in the streets, major European parties joined in condemning the regime, becoming advocates for jailed human rights activists, students, and labor leaders. This public effort spurred diplomatic action. Although European countries have been slow to enforce economic measures against Iran, they have sanctioned more Iranian officials for human rights violations than has the United States, implementing travel bans and freezing their European assets. Domestic pressure also changed policy in Brazil, where the government went from congratulating Ahmadinejad on his reelection in 2009 to offering asylum to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to be stoned for alleged adultery, in July 2010.

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