Dr. Shirin Ebadi visited Brunel University today to give a talk about Human Rights in Iran. She's a Nobel Peace Prize winner (2003) for her work promoting human rights, particularly for women and children, in Iran.
She got a degree in law, became a lawyer, and a judge in Iran. While she was a judge, she picked up a PhD in law. A revolution in 1979 resulted in a new Muslim regime that banned women from serving as judges and some other professions. Female judges were reduced to being clerks-of-court. Women were also valued less than men legally. For example, the testimony of two women are valued the same as the testimony of one man. (Here, I've shifted to the present tense.) If a man and woman are hit by a car and receive compensation, then the man will receive twice what the woman will receive. Also, a woman who doesn't wear hijab in public is arrested, fined, and subjected to 80 lashes.
Dr. Ebadi fought within the system for several years to in order to regain a license to practice law.
Iran is an extremely dangerous place to be a dissident. It's ranked highest for the number of reporters in prison. While investigating the mysterious murders of some outspoken people, Dr. Ebadi found that the orders for the murders went to the top of the government. An intermediate mid-level government official was sentenced to death and killed for the crime in order to abort the investigation, but, during the investigation, she found a list of people who were in line to be assassinated, and her name was right at the top. Death threats sound like a common occurrence in her life, as well as threats against her family.
Anyway, she had some amazing, frightening, and encouraging things to say. One of the questions the interviewer asked her was, "The word, "frustrated," does not appear to be in your vocabulary. Why is this?"
Certainly she had reason to be frustrated. The rebellion in 1979 was not for religious reasons, she explained, rather it was men against women. Women's rights and children's rights were severely eroded.
"Like every other person, I sometimes get tired," she said, through an interpreter. "But then I think of my colleagues in prison, and I think of those who have died, and I feel I have no right to get frustrated."
Dr. Shirin Ebadi still practices as a lawyer in Iran and fights for human rights. She believes that Iran is on its way, although she is acutely aware of the enormity of the injustice there. Dr. Ebadi supports peaceful protest, and military sanctions against Iran, but not economic ones, which, she says, only hurt the people, not the dictators who are really the problem. She was favorably compared with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela today. They share a deep conviction mixed with a respect for human dignity, including the dignity of people committing human rights abuses. I like this quote of hers: "I maintain that nothing useful and lasting can emerge from violence."
In Iran, stoning can still be used to carry out a death sentence. Death sentences are often carried out publicly. For a list of executions carried out in Iran this year,
click here. I counted 90 so far in 2013, and today is April 22. Amnesty International is against stoning people to death.
More about that here.
Here's what Amnesty International has to report about Iran.
