Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on May 17th, 2016

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you.

Doctor, maybe that's an area this committee can think about with regard to some of the ways we can maybe clarify messages with the UN.

[Dr. Ahmed Shaheed]

Yes.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I just wanted to make sure that was an area we should focus on.

My next question would perhaps be for the professor.

With regard to engagement with the Iranian people as part of this platform for some type of diplomacy renewal that would tread carefully and would actually help Iran, I want to know a little bit more about what you see as some of the hurdles to engaging with the Iranian people, given that some of these human rights issues actually have to do with accessing social media, being informed citizens, and having freedom of the press.

What do you see as the underlying issues that this committee could really look at and consider?

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

I think, as Dr. Shaheed said, it's very important to understand that there is a civil society in Iran, which is an entirely different political space, and that the Canadian government should include in its restoration of diplomatic relations people-to-people diplomacy.

We have in Canada a very large number of Iranian students, for example, and we have different means of trying to influence that growing public space.

I think in that regard, the total isolation of Iran has served the interests of the hard-liners. The more that Iranian civil society is cut off from the rest of the world, the better it serves the interests of hard-liners who want to keep people backwards and disengaged and isolated.

I also want to explain that sometimes symbolic gestures can go a very long way. For example, a delegation from the European Union visited Iran a few months ago and they insisted on meeting with Miss Nasrin Sotoudeh, who I mentioned in my testimony.

She is, if you like, Iran's Nelson Mandela. We had a question about gender discrimination. The biggest heroes of human rights in Iran are women like Shirin Ebadi and Nasrin Sotoudeh. The fact that the delegation insisted on meeting her very seriously irritated the Iranian government, but it sent a signal that these are the rules for re-engagement with the European Union.

I know that within the European Union there is also a big fight now among those who want human rights to be an ingredient and those who want to sweep it under the carpet.

In that sense, Canada can do a lot that may be of a purely symbolic nature, in addition to having programs that reach out to students, labour unions, women's groups, and environmental groups. That's why the gradual opening, if it is skilfully exploited, can actually help empower those progressive forces, which I think will reshape the future of the country.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Excellent. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you.

Now for a five-minute question, we go to MP Miller.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you both for coming. The question I have really goes to the point that Mr. Akhavan made about there being extremes in the pendulum regarding the approach to re-engagement. You mentioned initially that Canada had to play the geopolitical game. I guess it's a very important game and indeed not a game, but at the other end, blind re-engagement is not advisable for all the reasons you mentioned.

Mr. Akhavan, you made a number of statements about Iranian civil society, notably that it has the biggest potential to develop and flourish compared to its similarly situated neighbours. I'd like you to develop that in the context of a careful re-engagement in terms of trade or lifting of various sanctions. Perhaps you could take a few minutes to juxtapose that with what the Europeans are taking and what kind of symbolic acts Canada can perform in order to get the right point on the pendulum to engage Iran and use the chips carefully.

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

Well, as someone who formerly worked with the United Nations, I can say that in looking at how people look at peace negotiations, for example, there are those who are the political realists. They believe that human rights ideals are for a bunch of NGO activists and naive idealists, and that the real issues on the table are security, economic relations, and so on and so forth.

That is a very big mistake. The problems in the Middle East that we witness today, whether in Iran, Iraq, or Syria, are inextricably tied to the nature of the regimes. A regime that stays in power through inciting religious hatred and violence will not be a regime that is a good business partner or a means for sustainable peace and stability in the region.

I think in that sense, we need to mainstream human rights issues and not see them as the exclusive preserve of some naive idealists and activists. Respect for human rights is central to global governance. It's central to the future of the Middle East. One can just imagine what would happen, not just in Iran but throughout the Middle East, if those progressive forces, which are just beneath the surface, came to power in Iran. How would Iran reimagine not just its relations with its own citizens but its role in Lebanon, in Syria, and its relations with Israel and Iraq?

I don't have too much time to develop these ideas here. I just want to explain that human rights isn't just a moral issue. It's also a pragmatic issue, and it's part of the geopolitical equation.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you.

Dr. Shaheed, perhaps you could build on that. I note that your report was criticized by Iran in a very cavalier fashion. Where do you think western powers are going right in their approach to Iran—right or wrong, in fact—in light of the P5+1 agreement?

[Dr. Ahmed Shaheed]

In terms of human rights, I think maintaining that focus is the right thing to do. If there were a tendency to put human rights issues under the carpet, then obviously it would be a tragic mistake, with serious consequences down the line. It would not be sustainable, either.

To add to what Professor Akhavan said minutes ago, on the need to have engagement with civil society, when businesses or companies go into Iran, as they'll now be going in, it will be important to remind them of their own obligations under the Ruggie principles. This is in terms of both what the parent countries or governments do in terms of holding their companies to account for their adherence to the Ruggie principles and also ensuring that the businesses in the country itself, in Iran itself, do not reinforce discriminatory policies or rights violations as they are occurring in the country.

Mainstreaming human rights where you engage with Iran is an important thing to do. I would not say that the engagement so far has been in error. I think it has gone on in a very measured fashion, but it must continue in such a fashion that there is actually substantive progress in the country or enough evidence of improvement as the engagement moves forward.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

MP Kent.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Gentlemen, as you know, in 2008 the European Union delisted the Mujahideen-e-Khalq as a terrorist organization, and every year recently the democratic Resistance of Iran, as the organization affiliated in Canada is known, has sent delegates to the annual Paris conference. A number of Canadian politicians have attended over the years.

I'm wondering what your thoughts are of reaching out to the diasporan Iranian civil society as well as the domestic, specifically with regard to this organization.

[Dr. Ahmed Shaheed]

If I may, in my view, it should be pointed or directed at a very broad range of the Iranian diasporan community. There is a wide range of communities out there, including ethnic minority communities, religious communities, and so on. Rather than focus on one specific community, it would be important to ensure broader engagement across a full spectrum, covering a whole range of different interests.

In my work, it's important, in my view, to distinguish between politically motivated activities and human rights focused activities. Having a very clear human rights focus would not only give a higher moral voice to what's said but also could make it clearer what the objectives are. I would suggest that it would be more useful to have a very broad spectrum of engagement with a very wide range of civil society, both in-country and in the diasporan community as well.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Professor Akhavan, go ahead.

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

I think that, in principle, any group that renounces violence as a means of change should be given a seat at the table. As Dr. Shaheed said, Iran is a very complex society. It is multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and politically complex. The point is to understand that all of those elements are part of the future of Iran, part of creating a culture of human rights. The problem in the past has been exactly that political groups use human rights in order to gain power, and then become the worst abusers of human rights. That is why I think civil society is so important—because it is, in a sense, divorced from power and creates a different set of rules for legitimacy.

I think the diaspora has a very important role to play, because Iran has a very sizable diaspora thanks to the many refugees or economic migrants who have left because of the terrible circumstances in Iran. They travel back and forth; they transmit information. One of the reasons why the regime is having a hard time is the Internet and satellite television. The young people in Iran are savvy, cosmopolitan. They know what is happening out there in the world.

I think that nurturing those relations is very important, which is why Canada has quite a lot more influence than it may imagine. Beyond diplomacy, defined in a narrow sense, Canada can shape things in a much broader way for the better.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Gentlemen, coming back to the sharp rise in executions last year in Iran.... Many of the executions are attributed—again, as we heard earlier—to drugs, drug trafficking, and common criminal acts. Is there any credibility at all with regard to the justice process by which these sentences are given and carried out?

[Dr. Ahmed Shaheed]

By and large, and on a very grand scale, I get reports of unfair trials, including some cases of trials lasting no more than a few minutes before a capital sentence can be handed out. The rule of law is very poorly administered, and in some types of courts, the judiciary courts especially, there is in fact no semblance of justice being done at all. The bigger concern, of course, is that there are a number of capital offences in the country, including ones that are illegal under international law, but the process by which they arrived at these sentences is seriously flawed as well.

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

If I may add to that. First of all, the Iranian judiciary is fundamentally flawed. After the revolution, qualified judges were replaced by religious jurists. There is a fundamental problem having a set of qualified judges in Iran.

The second point is that the issue of narcotics trafficking is rather complex, and there are many accounts of the IRGC being one of the key players in narco-trafficking, which shows a rather cynical game of executing people while the IRGC is trafficking in narcotics. Opium use, including by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, is almost a well-known fact in those inner circles.

What I want to point out is the public spectacle of executions. It doesn't matter why people are being killed, but when you hang them from cranes in the middle of a public square, we think about the law of retaliation in pre-modern Europe. The point is to strike terror into the hearts of the citizenry. It is less important for people why someone is killed; it is more important that they are killed, and they are killed in a gruesome way in public. I think one of the issues that should be on the table—in addition to what Dr. Shaheed said, which is restricting the number of crimes for which there is a death penalty—is simply to push Iran to abolish the death penalty, and I think that within Iran there are many elements that want that to happen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

We have time for one short question from MP Tabbara.

[Marwan Tabbara, Liberal, Kitchener South—Hespeler, ON]

Thank you very much, both of you, for being here.

Because of the short time, I am just going to skip right to it.

Dr. Akhavan, you spoke last time at the committee here, in May 2013, about the case of Barmaan, who was one month old when his mother was taken away from him. She was serving a 23-month prison sentence in July 2012, and her only crime was that she was Baha'i.

Can you give us, briefly, an update on the situation of Baha'is, whether persecution is still ongoing, and what the situation is?

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

Sadly, the persecution is ongoing and escalating. As I explained briefly in my presentation, recently there have been about 50 arrests of Baha'i in various provinces in Iran. Many Baha'i shops have been burnt down and ransacked. Baha'i children are being terrorized in school by their teachers. Just as there is an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy by leading public figures and dissidents, the hard-liners are panicking and trying to really dramatically increase the pressure on the Baha'i community.

This group I mentioned in the province of Golestan that was recently arrested was a group of about 20 or 30 youth. They were subject to severe beatings and torture. It's a very serious issue, and there's a danger that, if the hard-liners feel that they are losing their grip on power, we will even resume once again the executions of the Baha'i, which occurred in the early days of the revolution.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much, Professor Akhavan and Dr. Shaheed.

We're actually now out of time. It's right on 2 o'clock.

I want to thank you for being with us on teleconference today and for starting our Iran accountability week in the subcommittee for human rights. It's been a very insightful hour spent with you. We have more witnesses coming in tomorrow. Again, thank you for shining a light and giving us some direction on such an important issue for our government and our Parliament.

Thank you for joining us here today.

[Dr. Payam Akhavan]

Thank you.

[Dr. Ahmed Shaheed]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

This meeting is adjourned.