When Governments Speak for Nations
In 1968, the United Nations held its first International
Conference on Human Rights in Tehran. Delegates met in the newly built Majlis
from 22 April to 13 May, twenty years after the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. Representatives of 84 states attended, along with observers from
international bodies and nongovernmental organizations. The meeting adopted the
Proclamation of Tehran, affirming that the promise of human rights had to
become a reality in people’s lives. The UN still records that conference as a
landmark.
It is hard to look at that history and watch the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran take the UN podium in September 2026 and instead talking about Iran, defending other countries rights.
Tehran once hosted a global conversation about human dignity. Now the
government that rules Iran is given the prestige of speaking in Iran’s
name, while families whose children were killed by its security forces have to
fight to get the world to hear their names. The United Nations did not summon
Pezeshkian as a special guest; its own rules allow member states to address the
General Assembly. But protocol is not morally neutral when it gives a
government an international stage and leaves the people it represses with no
comparable platform. What does it mean to call an assembly the United
Nations when the state is heard automatically and the people it claims to
represent must beg for a hearing?
We do not claim that Pahlavi period was free of injustice: it included
political repression and sharp inequalities between regions and classes. Yet it
also changed the scale of what Iranians could build. Education, public
infrastructure and women’s participation expanded, and that achievement cannot
be erased from our history. In 1963 women gained the vote; the 1967 and 1975
Family Protection Laws changed aspects of marriage and family law. Schools,
universities, hospitals and roads connected more people to learning, work and
public life. Girls who entered classrooms and universities were building
futures that their mothers might not have been allowed to imagine. These were
not gifts from a perfect state, nor did they reach everyone equally. They were
real advances made in Iran, by Iranians, and they remain part of the country’s
inheritance. Remembering them is not nostalgia; it is refusing to let the
Islamic Republic claim that modern Iranian life began with it.
Mohammad Reza Shah imagined a different future for Iran and
pursued a program of rapid modernization. He was educated partly in
Switzerland, spoke across languages and defended his decisions to foreign
journalists, sometimes under pointed questioning. His international visibility
was real; so was the gap between the country presented abroad and the political
voice available to many people at home. A woman in a village, a worker
struggling to feed a family, or a student who disagreed with him did not necessarily
have a safe, effective way to question the direction of the country. I do not
need to deny that failure in order to recognize what the Pahlavi state helped
build. The Shah’s ambitions and the country’s achievements were not the same
thing, but both belong in an honest account of modern Iran. Reform without
enough public participation left grievances that the revolutionaries exploited;
the catastrophe that followed does not make every earlier advance a mistake.
Poverty and uneven access to education did not make Iranians
incapable of thinking for themselves. Religious institutions had deep roots,
and clerical organizers used their networks to mobilize opposition to the
Shah’s reforms. Some people believed the promises of a more just society;
others opposed the monarchy for reasons of their own. Leaders who later seized
power exploited those hopes and then denied many Iranians the liberties they
had promised. The tragedy is not that a whole nation was foolish. It is that
ambitious change without sufficient public trust and political participation
left a space in which powerful men could speak for ordinary people and
use their faith for political gain.
Many Iranians who remember that period most intensely were
too young to have lived it, or were born long after the monarchy fell. They
know it through family stories, photographs, institutions and the freedoms that
women kept fighting to defend after 1979. They have also inherited a country
whose people have endured the Iran–Iraq war, earthquakes, economic collapse and
repeated campaigns of political violence. A government may claim credit for
Iran’s survival; I see the resilience of its people, and I cannot ignore what
earlier generations had built before the Islamic Republic took power.
When Iraq invaded in 1980, Iran’s defenders drew on an army,
an air force, equipment and trained personnel developed before 1979. Historical
accounts of the Pahlavi-era armed forces describe that substantial investment.
Those weapons did not fight by themselves: soldiers, pilots, volunteers and
families bore the costs, and the post-revolutionary state organized much of the
war effort. But it cannot honestly claim to have created the entire capacity
with which Iran resisted invasion. The people who treated the wounded and
helped rebuild afterward included professionals educated in schools and
universities established or expanded in the Pahlavi era. They worked in a
health system that also inherited earlier hospitals and clinics. Pahlavi
Hospital at the University of Tehran and the Farah maternity hospital, later
renamed Shahid Akbarabadi Hospital, are concrete reminders that changing a name
cannot change a building’s history.
The revolution of 1979 was a seizure of Iran’s future under
promises that did not deliver the freedom many Iranians hoped for. The new
rulers inherited institutions, renamed some of them, took credit for a nation’s
endurance and tried to impose their political and religious program over
older, varied Iranian identities. They did not erase Persian culture, nor the
many other languages and cultures that belong to Iran. People kept teaching,
healing, writing and loving their land. Iranian women and men have stood beside
one another in that effort, even as the state has tried to limit their choices.
The Islamic Republic rolled back major legal protections
after the revolution. Iranian women have nevertheless continued to study,
organize and resist. Their struggle is not proof that the lost protections did
not matter; it is evidence of how much effort has gone into defending what
remains and demanding more.
The present government imposes its own harsh limits on who
can record and tell Iran’s story. Reporters Without Borders describes threats
and arrests for people who speak to foreign media, while the Committee to
Protect Journalists documented how the January 2026 internet shutdown
obstructed reporting. Foreign correspondents have sometimes entered Iran, but
access to independent reporting and to detainees is tightly controlled. In that
space, ordinary Iranians film protests, record the aftermath of violence and
send testimony outward at personal risk. A person holding a phone should not
have to become the camera crew for a nation because official accounts and
restricted access leave its people unheard. Those images and voices need
careful verification, but without their courage much of the world would know
even less.
The demand for accountability today is not an exercise in
nostalgia. It is a demand made by Iranians who have repeatedly risked their
lives for dignity and freedom. On 16 September, Amnesty International reported
its findings on the suppression of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. It
documented 377 people killed, including 56 children, concluded that Iranian
authorities committed crimes against humanity and identified 87 officials whom
it says should be criminally investigated. Its conclusions require independent
scrutiny and legal process. They also require political leaders to stop
treating the harm as a footnote to diplomacy.
Then came the mass killings during the protests of January
2026. People had taken to the streets after years of repression and a deepening
economic crisis: soaring inflation and high living costs had made ordinary
necessities harder to afford, and families feared they could no longer put food
on the table. Their demands for rights and dignity were not terrorism. Amnesty
describes thousands of protesters and bystanders killed on 8 and 9 January. In
January, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran said at least 5,000 people had been
killed and that information from medical sources suggested the toll might be as
high as 20,000, as Amnesty’s account of the uprising records. Others have put
forward estimates in the tens of thousands. With communications cut and access
restricted, no complete toll can yet be verified. That uncertainty is not a
reason to minimize the crime; it is a reason for an independent investigation,
preservation of evidence and answers for families. Every life hidden behind an
incomplete number deserves the urgency given to a death the world can count.
On 23 September, Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the General
Assembly as president of the Islamic Republic. He spoke of children killed in a
US strike on a school in Minab and used their photographs to indict Washington.
Their deaths are real; their families deserve truth and accountability. The
school stood near an IRGC naval facility, a proximity that raises serious
questions about the protection of civilian spaces. However, Amnesty’s human
rights report concluded that the United States failed to do everything feasible
to verify that the school was a military objective. The children of Minab must
not be reduced to a propaganda prop; nor should their deaths be used to obscure
the thousands of Iranians killed by their own government. Pezeshkian gave the
Minab children a face before the world while saying nothing comparable about
the children killed by Iranian security forces. That selective grief is at the
heart of Iranians’ objection.
The photographs make the question of representation
impossible to avoid. Pezeshkian held up images of children killed at Minab
before the world’s cameras. They deserved to be seen and mourned. However, the
same president did not hold up photographs of children killed during protests
or tell the world who had fired on them. In January, as demonstrations spread
across Iran, the authorities imposed a near-total communications blackout on 8
January. Evidence of killings had to escape through broken connections and
people willing to risk detention to record what they witnessed. The families of
those killed were denied the same platform and the same national mourning. The
blackout did not merely interrupt the internet: it helped make the victims
harder to count, identify and remember.
Nor was the state's response simply silence. Pezeshkian and
other officials blamed foreign powers for unrest, while state institutions branded
protesters “rioters” and “terrorists”, attributed violence to enemies, and in
some cases pressured bereaved families to present their relatives as members of
the Basij rather than protesters.
The political pattern is plain: the government depicts
people demanding rights as agents of foreign powers, while Pezeshkian’s speech
at the UN described children killed by the United States as victims of American
aggression. Why was this contrast not confronted by delegates? When a foreign
power kills Iranian children, the government broadcasts their faces and demands
justice; when Iranian security forces kill Iranians, the lines of communication
are cut and the dead risk being recast as threats. Both groups of victims
deserve truth. The government gives one group a microphone and denies the other
even the certainty of being named. A photograph at the UN cannot be the end of
the story. It should be the beginning of questions about every Iranian life the
state chooses not to display.
The UN gave him the Assembly’s most visible platform as the
representative of a member state. That is how the General Debate works; it does
not confer moral approval on every speaker. But rules do not absolve an
institution of responsibility for the spectacle they create. The UN placed the
Islamic Republic’s president before the world as Iran’s voice, while the
citizens whose rights his government violates had no equal place on that stage.
A mother whose child was shot in the street, a former prisoner who can name a
torturer, or a young Iranian who cannot safely express political opposition at
home cannot simply take the lectern. The institution’s failure is not that it
lacked the power to arrest Pezeshkian; it is that it treated state protocol as
sufficient representation, even when the state’s claim to speak for its people
is the very thing in dispute. The UN calls this representation. To Iranian
victims, it looks like exclusion with a ceremonial seal. I condemn that failure
as a moral abdication: an organization built to defend human dignity let the
government accused of crushing Iranian dissent occupy the place of the people
it silenced.
The next day, delegates left the hall as Benjamin Netanyahu
began his speech. He addressed the Iranian people, named their courage,
condemned the regime’s censorship and asked where the world’s protest had been
for those killed by Iran’s rulers. In that hall, Netanyahu did what Pezeshkian
would not: he spoke directly to Iranians as people with their own aspirations
and named the violence their government had inflicted on them. He was not
elected by Iranians, but in the absence of any Iranian representative chosen
freely by the people, Netanyahu stood before the world and carried a message
that the Islamic Republic works to silence. For that moment, in that hall, he
gave voice to Iranians denied representation. Millions of Iranians praise him
for using his platform to recognize the courage of Iranians and to ask why the
people who claim to defend human rights had walked away from their suffering.
His words reached Iranians more directly than Pezeshkian’s claim to speak for
Iran. The delegates who left did not merely snub Netanyahu; they turned their
backs on the Iranian people he was addressing.
Where was comparable outrage in that hall when Hamas and
other armed groups killed Israeli civilians and took hostages on 7 October 2023?
Where is it for the Iranian protesters killed by security forces in 2022 and
2026? Some governments and UN bodies have condemned or investigated
these crimes. The question is why public gestures of protest by diplomats can
look so selective, and why the victims of Iran’s rulers still have no
equivalent place at the General Assembly podium. The people who attacked
Israelis and the officials who ordered or carried out violence against Iranians
are not the same perpetrators. Yet Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has financed and
trained Hamas, while the state’s own security forces have suppressed Iranians.
Those connections deserve scrutiny.
A president in a Western suit can speak gently of suffering
abroad while institutions under his government imprison or kill dissenters at
home. Clerical leaders can invoke religion while denying their own people
freedom. The language of moral authority cannot be accepted at face value. Every
delegate who walked out should be asked what standard they are applying to
every government in the room, including the one speaking under Iran’s flag.
Concern for Palestinian civilians is legitimate; so is concern for Israeli
civilians. Neither should make Iranian lives disposable.
The UN cannot excuse the Assembly’s grotesque imbalance. A
state’s place at the most visible microphone is guaranteed by membership; a
victim’s access is conditional, fragmented and politically weak. The UN can
publish reports while giving the rulers named in those reports the honor of
speaking for the people they repress. It can document violations and still fail
the people waiting for protection, justice and recognition. Reports alone do
not protect a person from the next arrest. The institution has heard Iranian
victims in fragments; it has let their government speak in their name on the
world’s largest stage.
What responsibility follows from the evidence? Member states
can demand cooperation with investigators, support independent documentation,
protect witnesses and relatives, name those credibly implicated in abuses and
pursue lawful accountability through their own jurisdictions where possible.
The Security Council can address grave situations, though its members too often
let political interests decide what advances. UN leaders can make space for
victims’ testimony beside official speeches and keep returning to the findings
after the cameras leave New York. None of these steps requires pretending a
report is a conviction. All require treating the people described in the report
as more than background to a diplomatic performance.
This is also why a comparison between Iranian grief and
Palestinian grief must not be turned into a contest. Palestinians deserve
safety, rights and attention. Iranians deserve the same. If governments,
campaigners or journalists can mobilize for one group and barely speak the
names of another, Iranians have a right to ask why. The answer cannot be that
the Islamic Republic is entitled to define our suffering out of existence
because it claims to stand for a different cause abroad.
There is a further question about the use of Iranian
resources beyond Iran. The US Treasury has documented support from Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including
financing, weapons and training. Iranians are entitled to ask what their
government spends on armed groups when people at home face poverty and
repression. That evidence does not establish that the broader Free
Palestine movement is funded by Tehran, or that every person protesting for
Palestinians supports the Iranian regime. Funding allegations about particular
organizations need particular evidence. The serious question is whether
international audiences can condemn violence against Palestinians while also
examining the foreign policy and domestic abuses of a government that claims to
act in Palestine’s name.
The promise proclaimed in Tehran in 1968 belonged to human
beings, not to whichever leaders later occupied Iran’s seat. The Pahlavi period
helped build a modern Iran whose schools, hospitals, universities and public
institutions remain part of the country’s life. The Islamic Republic inherited
that legacy and has never acquired the right to erase it, just as it has never
acquired the right to silence the people of Iran. If the UN wants to deserve
its name, it must do more than assemble governments under national flags and
mistake diplomatic protocol for popular consent. It must insist that states
answer to the people living beneath those flags, and give those people a safe,
audible and consequential place in its work. Iranians have survived wars,
disasters and the violence of their own rulers without surrendering their
country or its future. They should not have to disappear from the room whenever
their government rises to speak. If the UN can hear the grief in one
photograph, it must ask after the faces kept out of the frame and answer for
its own failure to make room for them.
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