where she is speaking out on all matters ranging from the economic sanctions to human rights issues.
“If you can’t eliminate injustice, at least tell everyone about it,” are the opening words of Ebadi’s book on Iran. And on this tour, she says she is doing just that.
“I am always being faithful to this motto,” she said, adding, “And that’s why I travel all the time and talk about it.”
Ebadi has been living in self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom since 2009, but has actively been lecturing, writing and speaking about human rights issues, especially as they are related to Iran.
“And the government continues to threaten to kill me,” she said. “All of this is in order for me to stop what I am doing, and I am not going to stop.”
She has been speaking out on a broad range of issues: from Iran’s extremely high execution rates to religious freedom and women’s rights, she covers it all. During a lecture at Duke University, she reiterated her longstanding demand that economic sanctions on Iran be lifted because they hurt common Iranians more than the regime.
“I think that you should lift the sanctions as they hurt the people. Let’s not forget that human rights is not an internal conflict. Any violation of human rights pertains to us all.”
At 30, Ebadi became the first Iranian woman judge in 1969 during the reign of the Shah. After the revolution of 1979, she was demoted to a clerkship. But she stopped working in that position, resuming her legal practice after she was allowed to open her own law firm in 1992. She took up difficult cases on behalf of dissidents and intellectuals, and fought on behalf of women and children. Her work was recognized in 2003 when she received the Nobel Peace Prize, the first given to an Iranian or a Muslim woman.
But the Iranian government was none too pleased with the development, confiscating her medal and diploma, subsequently returned after an uproar, and freezing her bank account.
“If they didn’t fear me, they wouldn’t do what they did, because they don’t want human rights violations to be brought to the attention of the world,” she told an audience in Minneapolis, where she launched her current speaking tour.
She is hoping to use her international recognition to focus attention back on the state of human rights in Iran, an issue that has been overshadowed by the nuclear talks and the escalating rhetoric about an attack on the country’s nuclear installations.
Ebadi explained the state of human rights in Iran with a few grim statistics:
“I want to tell you what the situation is in Iran right now: Iran has the highest number of journalists in prison today. We are only after China [when it comes to] the most number of executions; per capita, we have more executions. Capital punishment exists for 59 crimes; some of them are really absurd. On average, one person is executed every other day in Iran.”
She then requested her mostly American audience to pressure the US government to include human rights as an agenda item during the nuclear talks.
“If we forget the people of Iran and we talk about your [American] security, is this a discussion about faith and human rights?”