Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, if you look at the vote tally in the General Assembly, for instance, on the resolution that Canada sponsored, and you look at the correspondence of that vote tally with other votes taken in places like the Human Rights Council, you have to say that, yes, there are. There's kind of a solidarity of authoritarians, shall we say, a solidarity of the oppressors.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You know, there are plenty of candidates out there. It involves many of the countries that define themselves as Islamic; so the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the OIC, for instance. I really don't know if you'd find any state that's a member of the OIC that has supported something like the Canadian resolution or failed to support the Government of Iran in these kinds of votes, for instance—

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Guardians.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  It's crystal ball time. I think those of us who work in human rights always.... I'll speak for myself. We're in this work because we do have some degree of optimism that we can push things ahead and that in fact things are moving in the right direction. I personally am not enough of an Iran expert to make a judgment on that.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  This is extremely tricky, as we know from the experience of sanctioning governments. Obviously, you want so-called smart sanctions, you want targeted sanctions that do, in fact, target individuals, or perhaps institutions, but not entire segments of society, certainly not the society as a whole.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No, that's true.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I think her point would be just as valid today as it was a year and four days ago. In response to the first question, where you asked about the judiciary in particular, I neglected to say.... I mean, that is an institutional locus of reformers. That's not to suggest the judiciary as an institution is reformist, but there are people there, and I think they're some of the people that Ms.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  But certainly it continues to be the case today. Are those reformist elements more numerous today than before, proportionally greater than before? That I couldn't say.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I'm not sure how specific I can get in this, simply because I don't know the specific answer, but we do know that particularly among young people who are arrested for exercising their right to freedom of speech, typically that communication is done on the Internet. Typically it's done in blogs.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  To answer your very good question, I have to say that if one looks at, for instance, the list of co-sponsors of the resolution that Canada introduced in the General Assembly in November 2007, one is hard-pressed to find an African state, or certainly a state from the Middle East region.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  That's a good question. I think I have to be a little vague in my answer in the following respect. I think we have a very active civil society in Iran on many fronts. There are very few who have identified themselves as human rights organizations in an organized form. Ms. Ebadi's is one of the few.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members, guests. Human rights in Iran have been, for decades, extremely problematic, to put it mildly, under the government of President Ahmadinejad. Since his coming to power in the summer of 2005, they've grown particularly severe and are worsening by the year.