Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

Middle East

Politics

19 January 2025

6 min read

Bring on the noise: what Trump can do to help the persecuted in Iran and China

Dealing with the dictators in Iran and China needs noisy advocates.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A fisheye view of a large debating chamber in the round.

The Human Rights Council meets in Geneva.

Pope Francis hosted a delegation from the Islamic Republic of Iran late last year for an event purportedly related to “interfaith dialogue”.

It wasn’t the first meeting of its kind, and on the face of it at least, there isn’t a lot wrong with the idea. While Iran’s relationship with most Western nations could be described as “strained” at best, the Holy See has taken a different approach, maintaining diplomatic relations with Iran for the past 70 years, including the 45 years since the establishment of the Islamic Republic.

And it has borne some fruit, helping to secure the release of a few prisoners of conscience, such as Rev Mehdi Dibaj, a Christian convert who once faced the death sentence for his “apostasy”.

But it has also opened up the Church to accusations of kowtowing to dictators and enabling regimes such as the ayatollahs’ to present themselves in a more favourable light through the high-profile photo opportunities presented by events such as the recent “dialogue” in Rome.

And it is an opportunity you can be sure the Islamic Republic was not going to pass up, with its state media unsurprisingly happy to misquote the Pope by claiming he had “stressed how Christian minorities in Iran are allowed to freely meet together and worship in churches across the country, without restriction”.

In actual fact, what the Pope really said was that “freedom of religion [is not] limited to the expression of worship; it also entails complete freedom in the matter of one’s own beliefs and religious practice”.

So, slightly different. But, no matter, you can be sure that the vast majority of the over 90,000 viewers of Press TV’s account of the event won’t have been bothered to check the accuracy of the claim, and therefore may reasonably have gone away believing that Christians truly are entirely free to worship in Iran.

Another organisation representing Christians, The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), faced similar criticism last year when it accepted the invitation to take part in a Human Rights Council event organised by the Islamic Republic of Iran, under the deliberately misleading title, “The Role of Religions in Promoting Human Rights”.

The WEA was accused of “legitimising” Iran and even “seeming to support its propaganda as a purported defender of human rights”.

Iran will send another delegation to the Human Rights Council next week for its Universal Periodic Review (UPR), an occasion that has the potential, at least, to be quite significant, being the only UN mechanism with which the regime truly engages.

Unlike the mandates of fact-finding mission and Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, which Iran and its allies regularly decry as “politicised” and “selective”, the UPR is lauded even by Iran as the true and proper place for constructive criticism, as every single country undergoes the review - not only pariahs.

Several side events will be put on in conjunction with Iran’s UPR, on various themes including the situation of Iran’s Christian minority. But while the WEA last year hosted a similar event on the margins of the Human Rights Council, on this occasion it has declined the opportunity, preferring the path of “quiet diplomacy” and “dialogue” over public criticism.

Which, again, at least on the face of it, seems reasonable enough. As has been seen with the Vatican, such an approach can undoubtedly bear fruit. But it is not guaranteed.

On the other side of the debate, you have the human rights organisations who publicly call out Iran for each violation, highlighting individual cases with the hope of embarrassing Iran into change. For as much as Iran is a pariah, it still attaches some importance to its reputation on the world stage.

And again, such an approach has at times proved successful, as was seen in September with the early release from prison of two Iranian Christians who had been serving 10-year sentences due to their participation in house-churches, and whose cases had been included in a joint submission ahead of Iran's UPR.

But even this approach is not without its pitfalls. While there may be relief from accusations of kowtowing to dictators, there is also the distinct possibility that the pariah state in question may just stick its fingers in its ears and do what it wants anyway, such as in October when the Islamic Republic executed a German-Iranian political prisoner, Jamshid Sharmahd, despite years of vocal advocacy.

Advocacy certainly isn’t an exact science, at least when the experiment in question involves an unpredictable regime like the one in Tehran. Both quiet diplomacy and noisy advocacy can clearly work, but in neither case can it be guaranteed when the individual tasked with selecting their response to the advocacy is the Supreme Leader of Iran.

Surely the only way to ensure real change would be to make it too costly for the dictators to deal with their persecuted minorities in such a brutal fashion.

Western nations have a similar quandary to religious or human rights organisations. To what degree, if any, should Western governments prioritise human rights concerns over economic or political gains?

It has been suggested many times that Western nations are more concerned with oil or gas supplies, or other economic incentives, than truly seeking justice for victims of rights abuses.

When, for example, Keir Starmer speaks of wanting to have a “respectful” relationship with China, while engaging “honestly and frankly” on human rights concerns, what does that actually mean in practice?

The reality is that a behind-closed-doors discussion about a human rights infringement is unlikely to hold much sway if the violator does not share the belief that any violation has been committed, or even believes the victim to have been deserving of the treatment they received.

Whether it’s China’s targeting of the Uyghurs, or Iran’s crackdown on the Baha’is or Christian converts, one can be fairly certain that neither the Chinese nor Iranian regime feels the slightest remorse about its chosen approach.

Perhaps little could demonstrate this more than the mistreatment that continued to be handed out to Rev Mehdi Dibaj after the advocacy win of his release from prison. Just five months later, he was murdered anyway, one of three church leaders killed extrajudicially in the months after his release had been secured, including Rev Dibaj’s friend and chief advocate, Haik Hovsepian.

So is it really realistic to expect that just because we say we are concerned about the Uyghurs, the Baha’is, or the Christians, there will be any change in approach?

Surely the only way to ensure real change would be to make it too costly for the dictators to deal with their persecuted minorities in such a brutal fashion.

As ever, actions really do speak louder than words. And this is why many Iranians are hopeful that with the return of the much-maligned Donald Trump, the “maximum pressure” policy towards the Islamic Republic will also return and, through it, real change may actually be achieved.

There are many reasons, of course, to find fault with the incoming president, but when it comes to dealing with the dictators, at least, it could be argued that Trump has shown himself to have more common sense than most. The hope, as with the other approaches, is that it actually makes a tangible difference.

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Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.