Iran Essay Contest (3rd Place): Integrating Human Rights --- Politics, Sexual Orientation, and Poverty

EA has been honoured to support the essay contest run by Iranian Progressive Youth, "What are the Ways to Bring About Democratic Change?". Over the next three days, we will feature the winning entries.

Today's third-place essay by Raha Bahreini considers the challenge of integrating sexual orientation and socio-economic rights in the movement for change in Iran.

In the Civil Society of today’s Iran, “Human Rights” has emerged as a central vehicle for progressive political claims, and protestors and activists routinely frame their demands for equality and justice in the language of human rights. A lot could be written on the international human rights framework of which the right to life and security, freedom of expression and association, equal protection and non-discrimination, and minority and cultural rights are a part and on the potentials and limitations of this framework for the struggle of Iranians for justice and equality.

Instead of engaging with these important issues, however, this paper would like to discuss the very notion of the “human” at issue in human rights and locate this discussion in the current struggle of Iranians for justice and democracy. In particular, the paper will focus on the exclusion of two issues, namely, sexual orientation rights and socio-economic rights, from current conceptions and discourses of human rights in Iran and on the implications of this exclusion for bringing about a democratic change in Iran.

I write this paper at a time where millions of Iranians have waged mass protests against a violent establishment that has attempted to crush all hopes for political, social, economic and gender justice. The protests started immediately after the announcement of the June 2009 election results, which were believed by many people to be fraudulent.

Since then, we have been met by brutal force. Thousands of protestors, political activists, opposition members and journalists have been arrested; hundreds have been injured or murdered on the streets, and many more have been tortured and sexually abused in prisons and detention centers. We are everywhere surrounded with violence and inflicted with the loss of our loved ones.

Our sense of loss has not yet left us with feelings of passiveness and powerlessness. We grieve and are making grief itself into a resource for politics. Violence, and our extreme vulnerability to it, is giving us over to the touch of each other; it is pushing us to create, in physical and virtual spaces, a chain of human relations to protect life and nurture a vision for a more humane and democratic society. In many aspects, this is of course an extraordinarily beautiful and inspiring struggle. It illuminates, among many other things, the collective power to resist what the power (mis)represents as real and true and to expand the horizons of democratic political possibilities.

I highlight the above points about the visibility of violence, the vibrancy of the current popular resistance movement, and the spread of a “human rights” language in the fabric of the civil society to contrast them with the silence and close mindedness that still surrounds issues of human rights violation against sexual/gender minorities and the poor. In what follows, I will briefly discuss the current situation of each of these two marginalized groups so as to show how both are excluded from the terrain of human rights. I will argue this situation should be of great concern to all those who have committed themselves to the project of human rights because sexual orientation rights and socio-economic rights follow from the most vital of human rights. To dismiss this reality is to apply human rights inconsistently, to deny some humans access to humanity. This will undoubtedly jeopardize the prospects of meaningful democratic change in Iran.

Humanity Denied: Violations of Sexual Minorities’ Rights in Iran

Members of sexual/gender minorities in Iran are gender outlaws subject to shame, discrimination, abuse, torture, and state-sanctioned murder. The violence against them is widespread in its scope and horrific in its consequences.

They, nonetheless, remain largely unknown to the Iranian human rights community. The violence and discrimination committed against them on the basis of gender/sexual expression/orientation fail to receive any significant mention in the reports and demands of the human rights groups and campaigns of the country. Their call for sexual orientation rights is often dismissed as too extravagant in comparison to “real” human rights problems such as political repression and religious despotism. They are often told: “Perhaps one day we will address questions of sexual orientation, but let us first solve our “basic” problems.” Along with these trivializing attitudes toward sexual orientation rights, they are routinely located in an official discourse that finds their non-heterosexuality to be a human impossibility; this discourse constructs the homosexual as the impure, Western, un-Islamic Other against whom the real human is made; the homosexual becomes the less than human who must be violently dehumanized and erased so that the appearance of “real” (i.e. heterosexual) humanness can be maintained.

This aura of compulsory silence and “unreality” that attends to those Iranians who become the victims of human rights violations on the basis of gender/sexual expression/orientation brings to mind some of the questions originally raised by the renowned feminist philosopher Judith Butler in a lecture given in the Sheldonian Theatre [at Oxford University] in March 2000. In that lecture Butler famously asked:

What makes for a griveable life?....What are the cultural contours of the notion of the human? And how do the contours that we accept as the cultural frame for the human limit the extent to which we can avow loss as loss?

Butler suggested that these are not merely questions for philosophers. They must be of critical importance to all those who have taken upon themselves to be involved in progressive political struggles in the name of human rights. In the human rights discourse and politics, the “human” is supposed to be the ground for right entitlement. But as Butler discussed, to speak in this language, and to call out for social and political transformation in the name of human rights, we must also be "part of a critical democratic project, [...] one which understands that the category of the “human” has been used differentially and with exclusionary aims and that not all humans have been included within its terms.” We employ the language of “human rights” to assert an entitlement to conditions of political life that affirm self-determination, democratic participation, dignity and equality, but we must also “subject its very categories to critical scrutiny, find out the limits of their inclusivity, the presuppositions they include, [ ...] and the ways in which they must be expanded, destroyed or reworked both to encompass and open up” what it means to be human and to hold rights.

This is precisely what this paper calls for in the context of Iran’s human rights record with respect to sexual/gender minorities. The fundamental rights of sexual orientation are inherent within the most established and recognized rights in the international corpus such as the rights of personhood, liberty, equality, conscience, expression and association; accordingly those within our communities who advocate for fundamental human rights, and yet adopt a dismissive approach to the basic rights of sexual orientation are perhaps dismissing not so much the idea of sexual/gender diversity as the very idea of human rights itself. We cannot envision a new culture and social system that advocates freedom and equality and values difference and diversity, but remain indifferent to – worse yet, supportive of – a structure that subjects a whole group of people to an entire range of human rights violations due to their sexual orientation or gender identity. Accepting basic international human rights instruments comes with debunking the assumption of "natural" heterosexuality and recognizing the diversity of gender and sexuality.

When members of sexual/gender minorities assert their fundamental human rights of sexual orientation, they are not just discussing the rights that pertain to their individual desires but also reworking and contesting the norms upon which their right to access humanity depends. At this historical juncture where despite the extreme brutality of the regime, millions of Iranians are joining hands in the name of a less violent and more human-rights oriented society, this paper is a call on our civil society to call into question the preconceptions of what is meant by the “human”, and to become open to its expansion and transformation in the name of non-violence.

Impoverished Rights: Human Rights Speaks to Poverty

In principle, the international body of human rights with its guarantees of life, liberty and security of the person as well as substantive equality must provide a solid basis for challenging the social and economic inequalities that exist in Iran. In reality, however, the rhetoric of human rights in Iran has largely become a hollow mockery to the most vulnerable members of our society, i.e., the poor people who live in extreme poverty and require substantial assistance to meet their basic needs. The human rights discourse has failed these vulnerable populations by creating an impoverished rights regime in which civil and political rights are privileged while social and economic rights such as the right to social security, adequate food, housing and clothing are relegated to secondary, marginal and only aspirational importance. As such, the most vulnerable groups in our society, whose social security and livelihood is being increasingly threatened by neo-liberal subsidy-cutting agendas, are being denied entry to the terrain of human rights.

This is a serious omission for poverty is not a neutral issue of human security. The patterns of who are poor in a society often reflect long standing discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity, religion, social status and disability. Poverty affects women, oppressed religious and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and other marginalized social classes disproportionately, and it exacerbates every form of social and political subordination they experience. Delinking poverty from this reality narrows our understanding of poverty and deprives human rights of its potentially transformative content. It reproduces a false dichotomy between social justice and political freedom, thus rendering the language of human rights irrelevant to the most pressing issues of human dignity and inequality that the popular classes of Iran face, i.e., those related to poverty.

It must be understood that this exclusion is not attributable to any logic inherent in the language of fundamental human rights. The Iranian civil society and human rights community can choose to listen to the voices of economically disadvantaged Iranians, and incorporate their demands into their analysis. Alternatively, they can construct poverty and equality in a passive fashion so as to exempt government practices in the domain of social and economic rights from human rights scrutiny. What is important to notice is that neither of these choices (i.e., acceptance or rejection of poverty claims) is less political. However, one is clearly more apt to secure the full benefit of human rights protection for all Iranians, instead of merely for some.

Toward an Integrative Human Rights Discourse

Within the past two decades, Iranian society has witnessed the emergence of both secular and Islamic reformist rights-centered movements that have come together to challenge and confront the gross human rights violations that are perpetrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran. These movements and the respective activists and NGOs within them routinely report on Iran's abusive policies and practices, and question them in light of international human rights norms and developments. Despite their defiant nature, however, many of them still engage in what Hammed Shahidian names "roundabout politics": "[they] support and participate in causes that are not directly confrontational, but that directly or indirectly promote social justice, freedom, democracy and non-violence. As Shahidian explains, "this maneuver is, of course, not merely due to political repression, but also because prevalent beliefs may not allow overt identification of demands and objectives, particularly those that are countercultural."

The concept of roundabout politics can explain to some extent the absence of local autonomous movements by sexual minorities, and the reluctance of human rights activists inside Iran to include heterosexist limiting of gender and sexuality in their critiques of the oppressive structuring of law, education, labour and politics in the Islamic Republic. The concept of roundabout politics is less helpful when it comes to explaining the exclusion of social and economic rights from the dominant discourses of human rights in Iran. In that case, it seems the “neo-liberal market logic” that is dominates all contemporary institutions of power and is characterized by a strict division between civil rights and economic rights and the prioritization of the former over the latter, has a greater influence. Regardless of their different origins, however, the patterns of exclusion discussed above can adversely affect human rights theory and praxis in Iran and undermine the prospects of democratic change.

Iran's politico-legal regime is characterized by discrimination, and leaves no aspect of life free from considerations of gender, religion, ethnicity and class. It draws boundaries between men and women; the religious and the atheist; the Muslim and the Christian, Jew, or Baha'i; the Sunni and the Shia; the Fars and the Turk, Kurd or Arab, and it establishes material and symbolic advantages and disadvantage for individuals and groups on this basis. Within this polarized context, to relegate issues of human rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation, economic status, or any other social characteristic for that matter, to secondary status is to construct hierarchies of oppression, and to presume "a sharp and necessary distinction between lives that are human and lives that are not"

This is not just a problem for the excluded group in question, be it sexual minorities or the poor. It has implications for how our civil society envisions a new culture that is respectful of difference, and values equality and diversity. We cannot claim to work for creating a human-rights oriented system that would respect the fundamental rights of its citizens to personhood, privacy, freedom and equality, but remain indifferent to --- worse yet, supportive of --- structures that either fail to recognize the right of all humans to human rights or fall short of empowering all humans to meaningfully claim and exercise their rights.

Currently, arguments for justifying such exclusionary approaches abound. Our human rights movement is under extreme hardship even for its struggles for the most elementary principles of justice and law. Overwhelmed by political pressures and oppressive policies, many, therefore, rationalize their ignorance about hetero-sexism and their indifference to the fate of the poor on the basis that it is too early and dangerous to take on “additional” political issues.

I am not ignorant about the enormous political and strategic barriers that exist against having an open political discourse inside Iran on issues that are considered countercultural or hyper-sensitive. Nonetheless, it still remains important to critique the views that relegate the violations of fundamental rights concerning sexual orientation and socioeconomic security to secondary status and thus construct hierarchies of social oppression. These hierarchies reflect the privilege of civil society activists and scholars who evade engagement with the role of hetero-sexism and/or economic oppression because their hetero-normatively or class location unlike their political beliefs puts them in a position of power and privilege.

Accordingly, those who have committed themselves to the project of human rights and democracy in Iran ought to move beyond hierarchical and additive discussions of oppression and toward more integrative and multiplicative kinds of analysis that recognizes political rights, sexual orientation rights and economic rights as indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. Without such moves, the promise of freedom and substantive equality for Iran will remain largely meaningless to those who need it the most.