Human rights need to be included in any new agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons program.
That may seem counterintuitive, since the discussion is primarily about national security issues, such as whether Iran will have to dismantle its enrichment capabilities, or merely to stop using them.
Yet human rights are crucial — not only for moral reasons, but also because they will provide crucial leverage against the regime.
Iran is one of the most oppressive countries in the world. Not only does it imprison and murder its political dissidents, but it also executes homosexuals and kills women who dare to flout the strictures of the religious police.
The Iranian regime also arrests foreigners, including Americans, on spurious pretexts, holding them hostage and demanding billions of dollars in ransom money that it can then use to fund its terror operations.
The Iranian regime is also the world’s foremost sponsor of terror. It has funded, armed, and trained Hamas in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; and Shiite militias in Iraq. It has planned and carried out terror attacks around the world, including in Europe, South America, and the United States — including against American officials, Israeli tourists, and Jews simply going about their lives. Its chief export is evil.
None of that was addressed in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran deal that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015, and from which President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the U.S. Congress in 2015 that the pending Iran deal did not include anything about terrorism and aggression against other countries. But even Netanyahu left out human rights.
The model for any Iran deal should be the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, an agreement between the Soviet Union and the West. That deal allowed the USSR, which was already struggling to feed itself and its communist satellites, to gain access to trade and food aid.
But one of the conditions of the Helsinki agreement was that the Soviet Union had to show progress on several human rights issues, including the freedom to emigrate.
The result was that the Soviet Union had no choice but to open up space for free speech and political dissent.
The State Department website recalls:
[H]uman rights activists set up Helsinki Monitoring Groups in the Soviet Union and across Europe. These groups tracked violations of the Act and drew international attention to human rights violations. Furthermore, the Belgrade follow-up meeting introduced a review process to track violators of the Helsinki Final Act and hold them accountable. Together these measures enabled dissidents to act and speak more openly than would otherwise have been possible.
Soviet Dissidents like Natan Sharansky have cited the Helsinki agreement as the tool that allowed ordinary people to begin to organize against the regime. The regime could not withstand greater openness, and ultimately collapsed.
That is why, alongside nuclear monitoring, human rights monitoring must be part of any new Iran deal.
The only real guarantee of security in the long term is the replacement of a tyrannical regime that is ideologically committed to confrontation with a government, “Islamic” or not, that is prepared to live in peace with the rest of the world, and which does not need to create conflict to justify its continued existence and self-enrichment.
Striking Iran’s nuclear facilities could topple the regime, too. But “regime change,” as the Iraq and Libya wars have demonstrated, can backfire. Political change is more effective if led from within, by the people themselves.
The West needs a way to exert leverage from within Iranian society, so that the regime is forced to allow space for political and religious dissent. The Iranian people themselves are America’s best allies.
Netanyahu said earlier this week that any deal should include an end to Iran’s ballistic missile program. But the Trump administration needs to go even further. It should insist on human rights being part of the deal — a commitment to stop supporting terror abroad, and repression at home.
It is the right thing to do, morally — and it may be the only real way to make a nuclear deal effective.
Sometimes, freedom really is the answer.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
