What the US can do about human rights in Iran

This article is part of an MEI strategic initiative that examines how to enhance regional cooperation between the United States and its partners on addressing the challenges posed by Iran across the region, particularly in key areas like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Israel-Palestine, and the Ukraine war. Through a series of articles, short papers, events, podcasts, and a final policy report, the initiative will showcase a broad range of viewpoints and subject-matter expertise to inform a holistic and resolute approach toward Iran.

Last month marked the second anniversary of the death of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini and the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement born of her murder. The authorities’ subsequent brutal crackdown on the protesters is but one flagrant example of the government’s appalling human rights record. The regime’s disdain for international human rights norms is not the recent result of Iran’s transition from Islamic theocracy to nationalistic military-security state. Rather, it has been a feature of the regime from the beginning, as shown by (inter alia) the 1988 mass executions of Iranian prisoners.

When talking about human rights in Iran, many defenders of the Islamic Republic, or at least critics of the United States, engage in “whataboutism,” suggesting the US itself is hardly without blemish on this issue. Indeed, in 2022, Iran published a 72-page annual report criticizing the US human rights record, in imitation of the Department of State’s annual country reports on human rights conditions internationally. In this report, Iran claims, “America’s anti-human rights actions … clearly confirm the fact that the statesmen of that country take a position regarding the human rights situation in the world based on political preferences and interests,” a sentiment with which many in the Middle East and North Africa region would agree. However, qualitative distinctions can still be made among countries, and in this regard, one must note there have been United Nations special rapporteurs on human rights in Iran from 1984 to 2002 and from 2011 to the present, indicating Iran’s notorious global status as a human rights violator.

Many who follow events in Iran, especially the large and vocal Iranian diaspora, urge the US government to “do more” regarding human rights in Iran. But before answering the question of what the US should do, we must first assess what it can do. Even a perfunctory glance at recent history (think 2003 Iraq invasion) illustrates the limited nature of American power and the often-unbridgeable gap between intention and result. A better sense of options regarding Iran’s human rights situation comes only after first noting the challenges Washington faces in tackling this issue.

Impediments

(Not) setting an example

One main challenge to the US in calling Iran to account for its human rights violations springs from its own track record in the Middle East, at least in the eyes of much of the MENA region. American admonitions and exhortations work best when the US is acknowledged as leading the way on human rights, which is not the case these days. For much of the Middle East, America’s “bully pulpit” is more of a “bully’s pulpit,” and American concerns over human rights are in inverse correlation to its strategic interests in any given country. This perception of a double standard on human rights is most evident in relation to support for Israel, both before Oct. 7 and even more so after the subsequent Israeli military operations in Gaza, which, while seeking to extirpate the Hamas terrorist group, have left more than 40,000 Palestinians dead and much of Gaza in rubble. In this context, US government proclamations regarding human rights seem pharisaical if not risible to much of its intended audience.

The need for coalition-building

The US acting in isolation will always be less effective than when acting as part of a global coalition. Yet rallying such a united international front to pressure Iran on its human rights record comes with its own challenges. While the European Union and many of its member states have traditionally proved to be strong allies regarding Iranian human rights violations, much of the rest of the world, to include the vitally important UN Security Council Permanent Members Russia and China, have been decidedly unwilling to take up the cause. In this regard, one should note that among the current 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council there are but a handful of countries that traditionally have been zealous on this issue.

Sanctions over-reliance

Additionally, one of the main policy options — sanctions — has become somewhat degraded as a tool for tackling human rights in Iran. When it comes to sanctioning Tehran, the US has already not only picked all the low-hanging fruit but almost deracinated the tree. Ongoing issuance of new sanctions falls between diligent and essential rounds of “whack-a-mole” to penalize new Iranian sanctions evaders and human rights violators on the one hand and largely performative announcements of new sanctions that inflict no real pain on the other. Furthermore, this long history of using sanctions as a policy cudgel on a wide variety of issues has caused Iran to resort to 1) a “Resistance Economy,” which emphasizes domestic production unexposed to Western sanctions, and 2) a “Turn-to-the-East” reliance on economic partners such as Russia and China that refrain from pressuring Iran on human rights.

Competing priorities

There is also the issue of bandwidth. Considering the lack of official bilateral relations between the US and Iran, there is only so much carrying capacity in any bilateral dialogue. By definition, solving only one issue with Iran is easier than solving two, which is easier than solving three, and so on. Outside of the treatment of its own citizens, problematic aspects of current Iranian policy include but are not limited to:

• Iran’s nuclear program, which has violated its Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) agreements, and which presents the world with the threat of a(nother) nuclear-armed “rogue state”;
   

• Iran’s support of an extensive network of regional proxies, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran-affiliated militia groups in Iraq, all of which are destabilizing a region that, in large parts, is already on the verge of failed-state status;
   

• Iran’s military and weapons support of Russia in its war against Ukraine;
   

• Iran’s cyber-hacking, disinformation, and interference in the US and other Western democracies.

One of the reasons the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) were able to successfully reach an agreement with Iran on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was because there was only one issue under negotiation. Regardless of what one thinks of the JCPOA, it is unlikely such an agreement could have been reached if all parties had to also reach agreement on Iranian support for its destabilizing proxies, its missile program, and its horrible human rights record. Given this limited carrying capacity and the need to mobilize international consensus, prioritizing the issues to be negotiated with Iran is never simple.

Finding a path forward

Having noted all the above impediments to taking effective action on the human rights situation in Iran, we now ask what can be done. It might sound like a cop-out, but the deflating truth of the matter is the US is pretty much already doing all it can. In foreign policy, it is a truth universally acknowledged that just because a policy has not yet worked does not mean it is not the best possible policy, and a lack of results does not imply a lack of effort. Policies are probabilistic and slow acting at best, especially given the limits of US power and the myriad complex issues on the American plate. What this means is that an optimal US policy regarding human rights in Iran should continue to: 

• Shine a spotlight on Iran’s human rights abuses, both with its annual human rights report and by other US government programmatic activities. In this regard, collective and coordinated action with like-minded allies has proven preferable to acting alone.
   

• Sanction human rights offenders. Ongoing sanctioning of Iran’s human rights violators is essential, and the US should continue such actions. Yes, there is no “knockout blow” from any single new sanctions rollout, but the cumulative impact grows over time, and targeted sanctions of specific human-rights offenders avoids the popular blowback to the US resulting from sectoral sanctions that hurt Iran’s economy.
   

• Support those non-governmental organizations (NGOs) focused on Iranian human rights. There are many excellent NGOs working on the issues and documenting Iran’s ongoing abuses, with expertise and insights the US cannot hope to match.
   

• Work with corporations, like-minded allies, and civil society activists to encourage tech companies to devise and distribute virtual private networks (VPNs) and anti-censorship tools. To effectively respond to the Iranian government’s ongoing efforts to limit its citizens’ internet access, Iranian civil society needs our technical support to maintain this access. In this regard, the White House held a meeting with key stakeholders earlier in September, and the amount the State Department has contributed toward funding VPNs has gone from $5 million in 2019 to more than $30 million in 2024.
   

• Work in international forums like the United Nations to hold Iran to account for its human rights violations. Again, this is a long, hard slog, but such work is the trench warfare of diplomacy, where progress is often measured in small changes in single sentences.
   

Managing history

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The Irony of American History that “the illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny ... always involve miscalculations about both the power and wisdom of the managers and the weakness and the manageability of the historical ‘stuff’ to be managed.” Conscious of what Niebuhr calls “the dreams of managing history,” we should not assume there is a magical US policy to “fix” human rights in Iran. Rather, the US should continue to support as best it can those in Iran and abroad working to better Iran’s human rights situation, realizing the outcome is in large measure out of our hands.

Alan Eyre is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and the founder and president of EyreAnalytics LLC. He retired from the US Foreign Service in September 2023 after a 40-year government career.

Photo by Oscar del Pozo/AFP via Getty Images