"Iranians are no longer afraid of prison, because Iran itself has become a prison."
Those are the words of Katayoun Riahi, the first actress in Iran to remove her compulsory
hijab in public, in solidarity with the protests, just a few days after the murder in custody
of Mahsa Jina Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, arrested for inappropriate hijab.
Katayoun herself was later arrested and charged for flouting the oppressive dress code.
Mahsa's fate, of course, was the spark that ignited the
revolutionary protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran,
a decades-long theocracy, that has hijacked a multi-millennial civilization.
These protests and their battle cry "women, life, freedom,"
have shaken the foundation of a repressive misogynistic regime,
and reverberated across the world.
While Iran has become accustomed to mass uprisings for the past 44 years,
this has been the greatest existential threat the regime has ever faced.
And the reciprocal crackdown has been equally brutal.
Since last September, there have been more than 520
protesters killed, including women and minors.
Seven executed with many more facing the gallows.
More than 20,000 arrested and thousands of Iranians blinded,
gassed, raped, tortured, forcibly disappeared.
While I stand before you, my counterparts in Iran,
artists, activists risk their lives and their livelihoods to dare to dissent.
It doesn't escape me that their destiny could have easily been mine,
which is why I feel so compelled to use my freedoms to demand theirs.
To best do so, let me take a step back.
My first protest was when I was in my mother's womb.
She was 19 and she bravely joined the countless protesters,
who bravely stood up against the newly forming theocracy in 1979.
Thousands...tens of thousands of Iranian women,
also demonstrated against the new government's compulsory hijab ruling.
Their cries were met with violence and imprisonment too.
Few Iranian men showed solidarity but that demand for gender equality only grew stronger with time.
Ayatollah Khomeini's government, theocracy,
executed and imprisoned thousands of Iranians, exiled millions, including my parents.
Although we were granted political asylum in London, when I was just three weeks old
the crisis facing the people of my homeland was ingrained in my psyche.
And a traumatizing experience with the so-called morality police, when I visited Iran at age 12,
was just a glimpse into the daily indignities faced by
the women and girls of my beloved homeland.
The Iran I experienced was a far cry from my mother's Iran.
This is my mother at work in 1976,
when women were not segregated from men in classrooms, at beaches, on buses.
When veiled and unveiled women peacefully coexisted.
When we had a thriving national ballet, because dance wasn't forbidden;
and renowned female pop singers,
because they weren't banned from singing in public.
Iran was a country, where women won the right to vote eight years before the women of Switzerland.
So the "woman, life, freedom" protests are about far more than draconian dress codes.
Iranian women are among the very few in the world,
who have less rights than their grandmothers did five decades ago.
But for nine months now, Iranian men and women have united against
a gender apartheid regime that hasn't only survived by segregating and oppressing women,
but by silencing anyone who doesn't share its intolerant islamist ideology.
Masha was young, a woman, a member of an ethnic and religious minority group.
She represented Iran's vibrant diversity.
The antithesis of the geriatric male Shia clerics, who rule the Islamic Republic.
While women's rights triggered the protests, Mahsa's killing
galvanized a broad-based, pro-democracy uprising.
Today, university students, workers, unions, ethnic, religious, sexual,
and other minority groups, all recognize that the status
of women and girls is inextricably bound with the inclusive democracy they all seek.
And their unity terrifies a regime that has stayed in power through the policy of divide and oppress.
For much of the last four decades, western countries, their policies towards Iran have
focused on the symptoms of the Islamic Republic—terrorism, hostage taking,
nuclear proliferation, abetting Vladimir Putin—but not the cause,
which is of course the regime itself.
This is partly because the Islamic Republic has gaslighted, politically gaslighted, western
progressives and feminists by conflating support for Iranian civil society with interventionism.
While they support armed militias across the Middle East and Russia's war on Ukraine,
they've skillfully co-opted the anti-imperialist narrative,
seeking to delegitimize Iranian freedom seekers as western stooges and deny us our agency.
But the recent uprisings have, once again, revealed the true nature of this regime.
When I began my human rights work, 15 years ago, well-meaning progressives would often tell me
that we must respect the cultural differences of the Islamic Republic.
I always objected.
Now, they're increasingly starting to see that
authentic cultural norms don't need to be enforced by violence.
Iranians are risking everything precisely
because the Islamic Republic's despotic culture is not theirs.
Make no mistake!
Today's Iranian liberal Iranian is not the anti-imperialist of Yesterday.
None of the protest slogans in the past nine months have been targeted at the west.
They've uniformly been targeted at their own regime.
They include, "death to the dictator,"
"death to the Islamic Republic," "our enemy is right here, they lie that it's America."
Despite unspeakable assaults on their minds, bodies, and souls,
schoolgirls have taken to the streets, removing their compulsory hijabs,
and chanting, "we don't want an Islamic Republic."
Of course, this yearning for secularism is a natural backlash
to almost half a century of fundamentalist rule.
Out of four decades of failed reforms, these protesters know all too well,
that the only way to gain their freedoms is by calling for an end to their regime.
So how can we best help them
achieve and overcome the regime's survival strategy of divide and oppress.
While autocracies are often united
in their domestic and global objectives, democracies are not.
Which is why I've been urging International
lawmakers and activists to work together, and with us,
to increase the political cost to the Islamic Republic of their oppression and aggression,
and tip the balance of power in favor of the Iranian Democrats.
Today, Iran's embattled protesters can't afford to be disunited.
While they faced the challenge of their lives, the fight of their lives, the question is:
can we, those of us living comfortably in western democracies,
set aside our differences to unite and empower them in their fight for freedom?
Our collaboration really is key because policies
that appease the Islamic Republic, not only fail the Iranian people,
but they fail the people of Ukraine, of Syria, of Venezuela, and beyond.
As my fellow democracy activists know all too well,
the road to freedom is long and filled with potholes.
Hard-won gains are often followed by demoralizing setbacks.
Despite the unprecedented victory of kicking the Islamic Republic
off the UN Commission on the Status of Women,
the UN's highest legislative body on women's rights,
just six months later, they are now going to be vice president of the general assembly,
and their representative will chair the UN Human Rights Council social forum.
As long as the United Nation, particularly democracies, legitimizes
the Islamic Republic on the world stage; as long as freedoms of champion are divided,
while autocrats are united,
we are enabling the Islamic Republic and their crimes at home and abroad.
I'm going to leave you with one of those crimes.
This is young Kian Pirfalak.
He had dreams of becoming an inventor.
He was the pride and joy of his family.
During the protest, his car, the one that he was in with his father,
was sprayed with the bullet of Islamic Republic forces.
He didn't live to see his 10th birthday.
Before he died, he made a video proudly showing off his latest invention.
The first line of that video has captured the hearts and imagination of an entire nation.
"In the name of the god of rainbows."
Kian's innovative and hopeful spirit reminds us that the cruelty
and cynicism of the Islamic Republic is alien to an Iranian civilization,
that under Cyrus the Great, codified the first charter on human rights, 2,500 years ago.
That is the Iran these protesters are seeking to reclaim.
For many Iranians, Kian's rainbow
is a representation of the intersectional coalition they want.
A reminder that in order to defeat tyranny, we have to unite against it.
Thank you. [Applause]