The Politics of Human Rights in Iran: Between Islamism and Pragmatism

This paper examines the politics of human rights in Iran. It explores how the Islamic Republic reconceptualises and responds to the perceived ‘Western discourse of human rights’ and it highlights the tensions and compromises made between this discourse and Tehran’s official Islamic discourse. The main question of this article is that the Islamic Republic of Iran has faced ‘Western discourse of human rights’ and what effect has this discourse had on the human rights perspective of the Islamic Republic of Iran? This article is based on the idea that the Islamic Republic of Iran has adopted a softer and more pragmatic position in the face of Western human rights. The paper suggests that Tehran’s human rights discourse is increasingly becoming a more resilient and dextrous site of ideological gravity in the maintenance of power for the Iranian state’s elite. The concept of human rights, as fleshed out in the Republic’s politics, has Islamic and Western dimensions which interact and entwine as the expediencies of Iranian political life play out. As such, Tehran at times adopts offensive (anti-Western) values and at others defensive (pro-Islamic) approaches. This paper argues that a third thus emerging in the Islamic Republic’s human rights discourse: the politics of pragmatism and compromise. The empirical evidence drawn from interviews and official documents supports this argument that the Iranian state is increasingly capable of using human rights as a foci of ideological legitimisation of the status quo – the Republic’s institutions which regulate and monitor human rights are seen here as ‘epistemic sites’. They define the borders of legitimacy and normalcy in human rights discourse and praxis in Iran. The data of this article is the result of a series of interviews and the method of the article is critical discourse analysis and tries to present a new narrative of human rights positions of the Islamic Republic of Iran.