ABSTRACT
Inspiration for reform, as well as its execution, can come from many places. In the summer of 2004 the idea of human rights was spreading like wildfire across NGOs and semi-governmental organizations in Tehran and other Iranian cities. At the time I was working for a Tehran-based NGO, the House of Culture and Sustainable Development (HCSD), doing research for a book on Iranian civil society organizations. These organizations had grown in an unprecedented fashion since the reformist president Khatami came to power in 1997. The newly fashionable “human rights question” was immediately linked for women’s rights advocates with questions around the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The latter was a hot topic given that in the previous year, 2003, the Iranian majlis had authorized the ratification of CEDAW only for the authorization to be vetoed by the Shoray-e Negahaban (Guardian Council) on the grounds that it was contradictory to Islam. The dispute between majlis and Shoray-e Negahban on the ratification of CEDAW was brought to the Shoray-e Maslehat-e Nezam (Expediency Council), where the decision remains, untaken and dormant. Women’s rights activists in 2004 were hopeful that they could convince the state to ratify CEDAW soon, particularly given that they had the backing of the majlis . It was in this context that my house was raided and my possessions, including my notes, interview tapes and laptop were confiscated by the intelligence agency of the Iranian Interior Ministry ( vezarat keshvar ). When everything was given back to me three months later, the tapes and the computer had been wiped clean of all information. I was left with the notes I had taken during my interviews on Iranian civil society organizations and my memories. In 2010 I decided to revisit the question of CEDAW with Iranian women’s rights activists through a series of interviews. I conducted these with the help of Maryam Hosseinkhah and included in them some of the same women I had previously met with in 2004. During the course of these interviews I noticed that the hope that Iran would
1 See, for example, Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab, “Human Rights: A Western Construct with Limited Applicability” in Human Rights: Cultural and Ideological Perspectives , ed. Adamantia Pollis and Peter Schwab (New York: Praeger, 1979), 1-18. See also Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 70-72.
