Women, Democracy and Islam
Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi on Human Rights
By Nguyen Tang Le Huy Quoc-Benjamin, for the Chronicle
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“I am here not as a representative of any government nor any political party, but as a defendant and a lawyer of human rights defending the people who have devoted their life to human rights”, 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi said as she began her lecture on the human rights connection to peace and societal development (see UN Chronicle Issue 1, 2004). On 2 June 2004 at UN Headquarters in New York, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) sponsored a presentation by Mrs. Ebadi entitled “Women, Democracy and Islam”.
Mrs. Ebadi has had a long career as a judge in Tehran, Iran, where she has served as President of the City Court. Since 1979, she has worked as a defense lawyer for political dissidents and taught at Tehran University’s College of Law. She has shown her independence, activism and advocacy as founder and leader of the association for support of children’s rights in Iran, as well as through a series of publications, including “The Rights of the Child—A Study of Legal Aspects of Children’s Rights in Iran”, published with the support of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The achievements and respect that Mrs. Ebadi has gained prove that she is a person truly concerned not only about her own country, or solely the role of women in Islamic countries and the world, but also about universal human rights. She is so committed to protecting human rights because she feels they are the foundation for creating a more just and free world for all.
In her lecture, Mrs. Ebadi commented that even though 55 years had passed since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the world was still not free from the scourge of war. Fear and insecurity, which have always been salient features of developing and totalitarian countries, had recently affected developed and democratic societies as well. The tragedy of hunger, poverty and backwardness, manifested through the lack of access to drinking water, health care and medicine, was still haunting a large part of the world population, of which over one sixth, she pointed out, rely on a daily income of less than one dollar. The international governance of all aspects of human rights, ranging from civil, political and economic to social and cultural rights, has long been ratified by the United Nations; yet its implementation has been stagnant in the last fifty years. Mrs. Ebadi said she believed that until human rights are universally recognized and the entire world comes to understand that freedom and justice are inseparable, stagnancy would not be broken. In her own words, “no one can reach social justice without freedom, and you cannot eliminate poverty, discrimination and social classification without freedom”.
Mrs. Ebadi reviewed the eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): eradicate poverty and starvation; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and elevate the status of women; reduce child mortality rate; improve maternal health; fight devastating diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop and expand global cooperation and partnership for development. She stressed that the goal of expanding global cooperation is last in the list because “the performance of the other goals depends on the fulfillment of this very goal”.
The difference between developed and developing countries was amazing, she said. According to a UNDP report, life expectancy in Japan is 81.3 years, while in Sierra Leone it is 34.5 years. Some 82 per cent of the Ugandan population has a daily income of less than $1; and in Angola, only 154 of 1,000 children born would survive the first two years. Mrs. Ebadi then asked the audience: “Honestly, how can one fill this deep gap without international cooperation?” Nevertheless, there are other concerns that need to be taken into consideration when international cooperation is at play, especially when this cooperation is portrayed merely by granting loans and credits. As she explained, “granting loans [to countries whose governments are non-democratic] is equal to the assistance to the dictator and opposition to the oppressed people”. Instead of benefiting the poor who needed the funds, loans granted were spent on government luxury items and their surplus credited to politicians’ bank accounts. Consequently, the authoritarian regime is strengthened, enabling it to oppress the people; human rights are therefore ridiculed and ignored at an even more alarming level. On the other hand, people in those non-democratic countries would become indebted because they would have to compensate in the form of tax for the financial misuses of their Governments, besides suffering from human rights abuses.
For that reason, Mrs. Ebadi pointed out that more than one eighth of the world’s population is born indebted. This absurdity, she said, would inexorably lead to civil rebellions and more importantly to a rage against the donor countries by the poor who were affected by the immediate consequences those loans had on their living conditions. As she put it, “anger is an enemy of wisdom, and the angry people may attend actions that might endanger universal security”. It was precisely for this reason that the cycle of violence would never stop, she added. While countries were spending too much effort on waging war and maintaining strong armed forces, combating what they assumed would be the cause of terrorism, they tended to neglect the root cause of the problem: the discontentment of the poor. Mrs. Ebadi suggested that such a cycle of violence could have been avoided by “a little bit of wisdom”. Had pre-conditions for granting loans and credits been ensured, she said countries worldwide could have enhanced their movement towards democracy and promotion of human rights. She also stressed that without observing human rights, countries, especially the poor ones, surely could not attain economic development simply because of granted loans and credits. Funds need to be accompanied with a forceful framework which could guarantee that aid be put in the right hands.
Just as crucial to the development of countries would be the establishment of fair elections and freedom of speech, Mrs. Ebadi said. Fair elections enabled citizens to participate effectively in deciding their future leaders and the policies the country would take. A healthy society should also be the society that gives credence, in terms of social participation, to all of its citizens, including women and minorities. A Government that fails to do so, she said, would “deprecate half of the potential of the society” and hence stunt the country’s sufficiency and growth. She also expressed concern about the fact that certain Islamic countries still do not officially recognize women’s rights, particularly as a wife. “The value of a woman’s life is half of that of a man’s life”, she said, explaining that the testimony of two women in the court would be equal to that of one man, or the compensation for any injury or damage to a woman would be half of that to a man. Mrs. Ebadi stressed that those countries could never live up to their full capacity to develop when half of their population had been deprived of its dignity and citizenship. In addition, children–the promise for a brighter future–in those countries had also suffered from violations of rights and the lack of access to a primary education. Mrs. Ebadi underscored this discouraging reality by noting that there are countries whose military budget was ten times that of its educational budget. Their prospects for growth were about as slim as the chance for an addicted gambler to stop wasting his money gambling.
While the United Nations is undeniably the international platform for Governments around the world, international civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are necessary to ensure that it is effective and efficient. Without their participation, countries could never implement the programmes and policies aimed at achieving the MDGs that the United Nations and its agencies have been pursuing. Yet, dangers also lay ahead in international civil society. Mrs. Ebadi pointed out that if authoritarian political systems had been impeding certain countries’ growth, so too had the hypocrisy of their civil societies. Non-democratic regimes would oftentimes create their own “non-governmental organizations”. As elusive as these fake NGOs might be, they are a real threat to those countries’ development and, more importantly, the promotion of democracy and human rights there.
In conclusion, Mrs. Ebadi expressed the hope that the eight MDGs for international development in the third millennium could be amended in a way that promotion of human rights worldwide would receive the attention it deserves. Historical experience clearly showed that without human rights, she said, no democracy would be born and no economic development achieved. She believed that “human rights should be a part of national culture and be inscribed in the constitution of the country”. She also emphasized that human rights are attained only through democracy and “cannot be bought by wars and imported like a cargo”. International cooperation would only be beneficial if civil societies realize that it must refuse any kind of cooperation with non-democratic regimes. Mrs. Ebadi recommended that the UN Commission on Human Rights exclude certain countries deemed to have violated human rights and that do not adhere to the basic conventions on human rights. Only then, she continued, would the Commission be free from corruption and governmental influence. The United Nations and its agencies should persist in their efforts, she said, so that one day could come—the day when “all world population enjoys all human rights”.
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