But i think that theres no other art form so readily accessible other than perhaps film, which we work with, too. But it is something there is something in literature that just captures the human spirit. This weekend, we look behind the scenes at the history and literary life of new yorks capital city, albany. Saturday at noon eastern on booktv own cspan2, and sunday at 5 00 p. M. On American History tv on cspan3. Now, a former iranian political prisoner talks about the abuse she suffered. She is joined bay former Obama Administration at visor on iran who discusses irans program. The foundation for the defense of democracies held this event. Good morning. Its a very interesting panel so i want to get quickly into questions. Very quickly set the stage. I dont need to tell anyone who is in this room about the depth of the problem of human rights abuses in iran. I would just read very briefly from the report that the u. P. Report filed for the u. N. Gen assembly when it was highlight, quote, pattern of systemic violations of human rights. Iran has refused access to the United Nations for several years, and the ug General Assembly submitted a report in which he said he was, quote, deeply troubled by increased numbers of executions. A pew addition, arbitrary arrests and detention, unfair trials, torture, and ill treatment, and crackdown on human rights activityist, lawyers, journalist, and opposition activists, and to draw an example from the weeks news theres actually what i gas what qualifies in iran for a slight bit of goodness. A wellknown human rights lawyer ended her 49day Hunger Strike on december 4th. Her name is nasarn, and she has in prison since 2010, and the regime imposed a travel ban on her husband and her daughter so she was on a Hunger Strike for 49 days, and has actually stopped the Hunger Strike amid word the regime is going to lift the travel ban. So, the victories are small and hardon and the news is relentlessly negative, but it comes at an interesting moment both for iran, which has apartmently elections next june, typically during periods of time when there is that democratic process. Theres even greater and International Scrutiny on irans human rights record. Trying to prevent the Iranian Nuclear program from arriving at the point where theyre actually able to produce a weapon, and how you tie an antiproliferation policy with a human rights policy is an issue that is often been difficult for policymakers to reconcile. So, why dont i quickly just open it up. Maybe ill start with marina, since your experience at this is so personal, and maybe ask you just on a very basic level whether you think life for ordinary iranians has gotten better or worse . The last few years, and just give us a kind of your best sense of what the human rights landscape looks like today versus, say, five years ago or a decade ago. Well, i guess this all depends on how much people know here about how bad, the absolute disregard for human rights iran is in general. I dont know how much you know actually about it. In 1979, when the revolution succeeded, we hoped that iran would actually become a democracy but that was not the case. My dad was a ballroom dancing instructor in iran. Im actually a christian in iran, and dancing became illegal, holding our boyfriends hand in public was illegal, and in school we had to cover our hair and ourselves, and i had grown used to wearing tshirts and wearing a bikini, and all of this became illegal so in classroom, in science and literature and geography, these are the early days 1980. Our subjects were replaced by government propaganda. I had grown up readingern necessary hemmingway and poetry and now i had to face propaganda eight hours a day and i was 14 years old. What do you think when having fun becomes illegal . How political can a 14yearold get . But you the 14yearold becomes political. That was the basis of all the protests that began in iran as early as 1980. Now, sharia law came into iran very early after the revolution, and under sharia law democracy and freedom of the citizen is impossible. The thing of sharia law that govern iran in 1979 and 1980 are still in place. Theyre have something cosmetic changes here and there depending on what administration is president of iran. If you wore nail polish you could get away with it. But does that really make a big difference . Does that mean that iran becomes free and independent are in khamenei . No. Under this constitution freedom and democracy in iran is impossible. Im sure you all know about the american hostages. Everybody knows about that. But just after those hostages were released, i was in prison in iran, and at the time we became the leader of the movement was the Prime Minister. Now, i was just explained with cable. And then then they make you walk and then when the sun goes down, they beat you again. Its a cycle. Under things in the better now for Political Prisoners in iran . No, they are not. Its exactly the same. Its not worse, its moe system more systemic. That is the situation in iran. When the hostages were freed, thousands of iranians who were prisoners did not hear about them. We were thinking, this cant be real. 90 of us were under the age of 20 and we were waiting for the world to say something, and news does come into the prison. Nobody said anything. The world didnt care. The world didnt know. I dont know what was wrong with the world but there was something definitely wrong, and that is why im here. Im here to make sure that the stories of iranian Political Prisoners, including the ones that are now in prison, is heard and heart goes to every single one of them, and by the way, if youre interested in helping them, please come up to me afterwards. Thanks, marina. [applause] ali, id like to ask you, in the last few years, those of us who write about iranian sanctions policy, have heard a lot about the increasing power and the revolutionary guard corps and Hillary Clinton said iran is edging closer to being a military dictatorship. I wonder when marina talks about this kind of long history of abuse of Political Prisoners, whether the agents of that abuse have changed over this 2030 year span, and whether the increased role of the irgc has an impact on the human rights landscape . Is the power of the military in iran actually making matters even worse . Thanks very much, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks for arranging a Panel Discussion about human rights. Its rather interesting that in this city, washington, dc. Most panels about iran are about the Nuclear Program and almost nothing about the Political Prisoners. It send a terrible signal to the iranian public because it means you do care about your own security, you do care about the implications of the Islamic Republic becoming a Nuclear Armed state, but what happens in iran does not matter to the washington elite. This is the signal washington has been sending to iran, and i think this panel and initiative to make human rights issue more important issue on the agenda, a signal to the iranian public telling them you do understand that a government which is treating its own population can of course not be trusted when it comes comes to its international relations, and just imagine how it would behave if it is also armed with a nuclear weapon. The revolutionary guard inherited the state. Then khomeini was making promises in the 1960s and 1970s. He promised the people of iran not democracy. He promised them justice in this world and salve vacation in salvation in the next. So, no one has returned from the other world to tell us if they actually achieved salvation. But we know about the justice for news this world, and the system is legitimatizing its treatment. Iranians are mostly muslim, bought very different understanding. The government of iran. And they, for example, do not understand the way that sharia law was practiced. At the time that you were in prison, and i have to say, this was lucky, at that time we had a prosecutor general of the revolution area tribunal. He was also called the hanging judge of tehran. One time he was invited to the city of the province of kurd kurdistan in order to look at prisoners. I believe there was 100 kurds who were accused of some kind of vague revolution activity, and the judge did not have time to go through the cases so he just said, shoot every second of them. And then people asked him, sir, some of these people may be innocent . And he had a sense of humor. He said, well, you see, if theyre innocent, theyll go to heaven. If they have committed in sin against the revolution, they receive their punishment. This is how the system was working back then. Now it is a different type of system. You have revolutionary guard officers which represent a new generation of iranians. Theyre replacing the old crafts. The old political class, its you, you, you, at the universities. Studying theology. The new generation spent its youth at the iraniraq war. Just warfare, just like iraniraq war, and also world war for the german. The jeremy machine youth out of world war i were vindictive and wanted to correct the injustice of the past. For them, correcting the injustice was more important than making germany a better country. Unfortunately, we see similar tendency among many revolutionary guard. They no longer have a religious base the same way the clerics have but are using terror in order to control the population, particularly theyre fond of show trials. Staliniist show trials. We have people who are the rulers of iran in he 1980s, who today themselves have been slaves to the system. They show up at trials, and they confess being agents for the cia , mousad, and of course no one believes. No one. Not a subject iranian believes these people, who served the revolution have completely become counterrevolutionary. But the idea is to look into the hearts of the iranian public, telling them that the chosen Prime Minister of khomeini, if he is not if he has to appear on short trial, if people who were cabinet ministers in the 1980s have to an short trial. This this change which is taking place. Thanks, ali. Emanuel, i wanted to move on to you, in light of what marina said about the indifference she felt during her period of imprisonment from the west, or from the outside world, and given alis observation that even having panels on iran human rights record is somewhat of a novelty in washington, what does that stay about what the west is doing . What measures the west the United States are taking specifically aimed at iran on its human rights record as opposed to proliferation or anything else. First of all i want to thank my copanelists and the audience, and fdd for giving me the opportunity to speak here today. Its a pleasure to be here. The last couple of days, i wanted to look specifically at the kind of policy that our present in the basket of western policy, visavis iran when it comes to human rights. Theaves service has a useful summary page of everything having to do with human rights for every country they have relations with, including iran. And the one thing that jumped to my eye, the great contribution to human rights on that pain washing the indication that european guidelines on human rights on a vast variety of subjects, from womens rights to Death Penalty and freedom of speech, was also available in farsi. And it kind of struck me how amazing it is im sure that millions of iranians are rushing to the west side of the European Union to read the guidelines of human rights which clearly are having a great impact or thin life. One of the problems were confronting it is a real problem. Ali alluded to it. We are confronted with a huge dilemma. The dilemma is the following. Want to stop iran from having Nuclear Weapons and the reason why that if you pursue a policy of support for democracy in iran at the same time, the regime will move away from negotiations and if we have to choose between depriving the regime of Nuclear Weapons or depriving the regime of its power inside the country, its easier to achieve the former rather than the latter and its better overall, that we can live with a authoritarian iran without nuclear reps and try to pursue a free iran, we might end up with a Nuclear Armed awer to tearan iran. So its a dilemma but doesnt serve our purposes well. We havent invested significantly on creating human rights tools. Theres a lot of things we can do to increase our policy. And by the way, theres something about interest about increasing if in the since we want to force the regime to make a choice between a Nuclear Arsenal and survival, the best way to convince them its time to negotiate is to tell them, you know, were going to do everything in our power to bring you down before you achieve Nuclear Weapons. So i think theres also, obviously supporting values which we believe are intrinsic to human nature, after all, we call them human rights because we believe they are what we are. Its not a good thing to be standing for human rights where its convenient, and not supporting them outside the western world. So, there is a long list of reasons why we should be more active and what we should do. Well, again, there are many things we can do. One thing i think worked very well visavis the iranian public, which is no great fan of their open government is to speak and use the tools of public diplomacy, which we have in our power, a lot more effectively, a lot more insistently to convey the message we support Democratic Change inside the country, we want to see the regime held accountable for human rights, and just to give you one practical apple of example of what we do. The work im conducting and colleagues are conducting is that while were making it extremely difficult often times for real true dissidents to come out of iran or, once theyre out of iran, to get support from western governments to become active in the propossession of change inside the country week rather lax when it comes to providing visa to members of the regime, former members of the regime, children of members of the regime, who are freely coming to the west to spend time as Research Fellows at ivy league universities, who are buying property and investing in our own markets, who are spending time at the respectable institutions who are using our Financial System tone rich themselves. I was recently told that the son of a very prominent member of Mahmoud Ahmadinejads cabinet used the twotier Exchange System existing in iran today to buy pounds, go to an exchange and back into reals and then go back to iran and buy himself a nice apartment in north iran. These are the things happening on a daily basis that are enraging iranians, that we are allowing out of probably negligence or our underwhelming Due Diligence when it comes como our immigration policy and who comes in and who goes out. And if we change just that, we would send a powerful signal inside the country. Ray, you russelled with this issues in the early days of the Obama Administration. I wanted to put the same question as emanuel formulated it to you, which is how does one integrate or reconcile an aggressive policy on human rights with a policy that is very centered on nonproliferation, is it impossible to do it . Emanuel says there is a bay and in fact used the word expedient. I would note that the administration took fair amount of criticism after the green revolution for not speaking up strongly enough, early enough, as the crackdown began there its also worth noting that about a year ago, the u. S. Announced a set of sanctions on irgc and other officials on their human rights abuses, which is somewhat different. These sanctions were different than the typical sanctions which are very much aimed at proriff proliferators. So the administration would argue they have tried to grapple this. How would you answer that question. [inaudible] talk into the mic. I think when you kind of look at this issue, which is not upstrictly a u. S. Iran issue but its imbedded in an international structure. That really began to deal with this issue as a proliferation issue and probably about 2005 and 2006. And since then, the iran issue has been sort of ensconced in a context of International Organizations, and the basis of iting in the International Organizations is irans violation of its obligations show. Conversation settles on proliferation. And for all the countries that are dealing with this, the british, the french, the germans, russia, china, so on, they all ten to view this as proliferation problem. So the conversation taking place between iran and the other side tends to be about that issue. Very narrowly focused. So, to kind of move that conversation you have to figure out a different architecture to address that. But the process as such is designed to deal with the proliferation issue and the conversation is that it has to do with irans violations of the npt and Security Council resolutions suggest iran has suspended activities and so on. But its a proliferation centered issue. There are two countries who suggest the issue between this is not a proliferation issue bottles do with the character, and those two countries are, one, israel, who doesnt view this as arms and the second one is iran, who, although this is an arms control issue from the west but theyre using arms control of a way of there are two actors in this con so, i think if you look at it historically, the United States has managed to negotiate successfully Arms Treaties with countr