Human Rights in Iran

Peter Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Thank you very much, Sir Edward. I apologise for any confusion caused by the late changes that we had to make to our intended speakers.

In the interest of brevity, I will not give a full summing- up speech. I commend the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) for securing the debate, and particularly on making such positive suggestions about what we might do. It is easy to identify, criticise and condemn horrific human rights abuses in Iran, but much more difficult to come up with ideas that might start to make a difference, although perhaps not as quickly as we might like.

We should identify and target individuals who have clearly committed crimes against humanity, as the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) said. We should also seek to maintain dialogue with anyone in a position of potential influence in Iran who we think is seeking to modernise and liberalise or can be persuaded to do so. I believe that President Rouhani is in the latter camp, but only just. His rhetoric to date has been encouraging, but his actions have been very discouraging. We need to keep up the diplomatic pressure, as well as the informal pressure that my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) mentioned.

We must continue to remind ourselves of why we think we have the right and the responsibility to get involved at all. It is because we are talking about human rights—the rights of all humanity, regardless of where they live, who they are and what they do or do not believe. We have a responsibility to defend those rights wherever they are being abused, even in countries that spend billions of pounds buying weapons and arms from us and that might be developing the means to threaten us directly—some of the interventions in this debate were possibly pointing to that.

Simply because Iran no longer presents a direct nuclear threat to us, it does not mean that we can ignore the horrific abuses it continues to carry out against the rights of its citizens. Possibly the most chilling aspect of today’s debate has been the number of Members who have been able to speak about completely separate and barbaric abuses of the human rights of anyone who follows or converts to the wrong religion, who is born on the wrong side of the gender divide or who dares to express a political opinion. We would consider any one of those abuses to be an abomination in today’s society, yet they are all happening every day under the Iranian regime.

Finally, we must be careful about getting on too high a moral horse. Many of the human rights denials and violations in Iran that we are rightly condemning now were fairly common practice in these islands not so long ago. It is only 40 years since race and gender discrimination were made illegal, and neither have yet been abolished in our society. Women still cannot genuinely be regarded as being treated with full equality. In my lifetime, someone mentally incapable of understanding the impact of his actions has been executed for murder, and magazines have been prosecuted for blasphemously printing things thought by some Christians to be offensive. Within the lifetime of all of us here, it has been a criminal offence to have sexual relations with someone of the same gender. Although it is right for us to continue to condemn and keep pressure on the Iranian regime, we should do so from a point of view of humility, accepting that some things that we criticise in others were common practice in our own society within our own lifetime.

If anything, that should give us optimism that however bad things are in Iran just now, they can improve. Five years before the East German regime collapsed, I would never have believed that human rights would return to East Germany. There is optimism for Iran, and we should continue to work on it.