Protests that erupted in December 2017 — at the time, the most widespread geographically since the 1979 revolution — sparked waves of uprisings against the regime’s mismanagement, corruption and repression. According to the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, human-rights violations during the 2022 uprising amounted to crimes against humanity: Security forces killed at least 551 protesters and bystanders, including 68 children, and arrested as many as 60,000.
Since then, the clerical establishment has continued to discriminate against women and girls, in what Iranian activists and human-rights defenders — including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who is on furlough from a more than 13-year prison sentence — call gender apartheid. A draconian hijab and chastity bill passed in December imposes still harsher restrictions on women; penalties now include death. While the law has been paused, parts are being enforced.
The Islamic republic also continues its longstanding use of executions to instill fear, particularly among minority groups such as the Kurds and Baluchis, as exemplified by the risk of execution of Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Verisheh Moradi. At least 901 people were executed last year — the most in a decade in Iran and the most per capita globally. In an environment where authorities act with impunity, families of the victims of protest crackdowns, prisoners and dissidents don’t have the right to seek justice. If they demand it, they face reprisals through state harassment and prison sentences, such as with Manouchehr Bakhtiari and Nahid Shirbisheh, the parents of the slain protester Pouya Bakhtiari.
Nearly every American president in the past half-century has recognized that human rights and national security are inextricable — even if merely through statements. The Carter administration attempted to center human rights in its foreign policy, ultimately with uneven application and mixed results, including in Iran. The Reagan administration advocated an aggressive policy grounded in military and moral strength against the Soviet Union, with human rights forming the heart of that moral stance. The Reagan administration continued Carter-era support of Poland’s anti-Communist Solidarity movement, which emerged in 1980, and monitored Soviet compliance with human-rights provisions of international agreements, including the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.
Unlike Jimmy Carter, who saw human rights as a goal in its own right, Ronald Reagan took a conservative approach, wielding human rights as a Cold War weapon against Communism. As a result, while the administration attacked Communist governments’ human-rights records, it supported anti-Communist authoritarian regimes that violated human rights in regions like Latin America. Mr. Reagan also embraced a more narrow definition of human rights, focusing primarily on religious freedom and civil and political rights violated by the U.S.S.R. Still, his efforts increased global pressure on the Soviet Union and emboldened dissidents in the Eastern bloc.
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