Mr. Chair, distinguished committee members, thank you for the invitation. It is a very great privilege to be able to share with you some ideas on the status of human rights in Iran and, specifically, on the persecution of the Bahá'í minority.
I'm very grateful that the committee has seen fit to organize this session. I begin by emphasizing the tremendous importance of speaking out in what is a very delicate period of transition in Iran, which I will address shortly. I think it's in that broader context that the persecution of the Bahá'ís has to be understood and it's against that context that our response has to be gauged.
First of all, I want to emphasize, in providing the context of what is happening to the Bahá'ís—and Ms. Susanne Tamas will be speaking in particular about the situation of the Bahá'í leaders who are being persecuted presently—that the persecution of the Bahá'ís is not a religious issue. This is not an issue about Islam; it's an issue about the monopolization of religious truth in order to buttress authoritarian power in Iran. That understanding is essential in appreciating how the Bahá'ís are being demonized as the source of all evil, as an all-purpose scapegoat, in order to distract the attention of Iranian people from the real issues that matter to them: issues relating to prosperity, corruption, economic opportunity, cultural openness, and human rights.
The Bahá'í issue therefore cannot be isolated. It is not just a question of ensuring respect for the human rights of Bahá'ís. The Bahá'í minority, because of the nature of the Iranian constitution, has become emblematic of the structural, systemic problems with the Iranian constitution, in which the enjoyment of human rights is conditional on belonging to an approved religion. In that sense, the wider Iranian human rights community has come to appreciate that the fate of the Bahá'ís has consequences for the overall situation of human rights in Iran.
In short, article 13 of the Iranian constitution does not recognize the Bahá'ís as a legitimate religious minority. Only those who are considered to be “people of the book”—Christians, Jews, and by special dispensation Zoroastrians—only members of those recognized religious minorities have legal status under the Iranian constitution, which, once again, as I explained, places the limiting condition of belonging to an approved religion on the enjoyment of rights. For that purpose, according to the hardline elements within the Islamic republic, the Iranian Bahá'ís are unprotected infidels who are beyond the pale of legal protection.
This has had very serious consequences. In the early 1980s, the consequence was the systematic execution of the entire Bahá'í leadership. Some 200 members of the Bahá'í community were systematically executed throughout the 1980s, and although the official explanation of the Islamic republic was that this was a political group opposed to the Islamic republic, the reality is very clear that those who were executed would have been absolved of all guilt had they recanted their faith. The religious nature of the persecution is very clear.
The consequence in more recent times has been a more subtle form of repression that aims to bring about a civil death for Bahá'ís. Bahá'ís are systematically eliminated from economic activities: the right to education, the right to pensions, the right to employment in the public sector. All of these forms of repression are a different means of achieving the same end that the government had tried to achieve in the 1980s through systematic execution. The documents that have been leaked from within the ranks of the Iranian government indicate very clearly that the stated objective of the government is to eradicate the Bahá'í religious minority. What we are witnessing in recent times is a process within Iran involving the emergence of a more liberal, post-ideological culture among the 70% of Iran's population who are under 30 years of age. They are post-ideological, pragmatic, and much more concerned with issues of economic opportunity and openness than they are with the ideology of the Islamic revolution.
It's for that reason that hardline elements have used various issues--whether it is the nuclear issue, the conflict in Gaza, or the bellicose rhetoric of the Bush administration about military confrontation--to construct an external enemy in order to demonize the enemy within, which includes not only Bahá'ís but labour union leaders, student movement leaders, human rights activists such as Shirin Ebadi, and others. All of these elements of an emerging civil society in Iran are branded as part of a foreign conspiracy. In a sense, the renewed attempts to crush civil society in Iran and to persecute religious minorities are a sign of desperation on the part of hard-liners who appreciate that the demographics of Iranian society are on the side of openness and engagement with the international community.
In that context, the question of whether to confront the Iranian government or engage the Iranian government is a matter of some complexity. We see now the prospect of some sort of rapprochement between the United States government and Iran. Once again, the openness of Iran and its engagement with the international community is, in many respects, to the detriment of those hardline elements who have nothing to offer the Iranian people except chants of “death to America” and the utilization of a clash of civilizations view of the world in order to deflect attention away from the real pressing issues among the Iranian public.
In that context, engagement is extremely important in undermining those elements, but at the same time, there is a risk that a grand bargain with Iran will sweep human rights violations under the ground. So there is considerable risk here that the Iranian government will get the wrong message, that with some sort of engagement they will be allowed to continue business as usual.
This brings me to my final point, which relates to what sort of responses the international community, including Canada, should adopt in light of this very complex situation. There are the hardline leaders, such as President Ahmadinejad, and their deliberate provocations, including the persecution of the Bahá'ís, on the one hand, and then a resurgent culture of reform and democracy among Iran's youthful population. It is essential that, while civil society is empowered and the hand of cooperation is extended to those who want to bring about democratic transformation in Iran, hard-liners are isolated, and that we send the message to them that these sort of atrocities will exact a price.
I have appeared previously before this committee to discuss, among other things, the case of Zahra Kazemi. You may recall the motion that was adopted by this committee calling for an investigation against Saeed Mortazavi, the prosecutor general of Tehran, who incidentally is also implicated in the persecution of the Bahá'ís, of student leaders, human rights activists, and so on. When the Canadian Prime Minister called for the arrest of Saeed Mortazavi, who was attending the inaugural session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in the summer of 2006, it sent shockwaves through Iran because all of a sudden it exposed the vulnerability of the seemingly untouchable henchman of the hard-liners. I regret that the committee's motion was never adopted by the foreign affairs committee and that it was never brought before the House of Commons.
I would invite the committee, in its deliberations, to consider how, beyond condemnation of the Iranian government's human rights violations, it may be possible for Canada to take the lead in pursuing a policy of targeted sanctions, whether we're speaking about travel bans, asset freezes, or judicial measures to isolate those individuals who are resorting to human rights violations in order to remain in power, so that those elements are isolated without isolating the Iranian people as a whole. For the most part, they want nothing to do with this sort of hate-mongering.
I will stop there, Mr. Chairman, and I will be available for any questions you may have.