Since September 2022, waves of fervent protests have swept through the cities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sparked by the arrest and subsequent death in Tehran of the 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police, who claimed Amini was not wearing the hijab as prescribed by the law in force in the country.
The protests continued into 2023 and were brutally suppressed by the Iranian Government with killings, mass arrests and death sentences.[1] Protesters not only called for an end to mandatory hijab laws but also voiced their demands for expanded freedoms for women, called for the disbandment of the morality police, and even challenged the authority of the Ayatollah and the overarching theocratic regime.[2]
During the first months of 2023, the Italian Government took a stand on the Iranian Government’s reaction to the protests during parliamentary debates. In particular, on 12 January 2023, before the Senate of the Republic (28th Meeting, XIX Legislature), the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Mr. Antonio Tajani, replied to a parliamentary question on the Government’s position on the repression of demonstrations in Iran by asserting that “[t]he respect with which Italy regards its international partners and their legal systems finds an insurmountable limit in the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. The reference made by the Minister to the “respect” Italy owes to other countries may be understood as a reference to the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States. Therefore, Mr. Tajani’s remark may be seen as a clear rejoinder to the position of those countries that consider this principle to protect them from mere criticism of their human rights record, even in the absence of any form of coercion. In other words, in the view of the Italian Government, the principle of non-intervention should be interpreted narrowly.
Conversely, it appears that the Italian Government interprets expansively the related principle of territorial integrity. On 2 February 2023, before the Senate (36th session, XIX Legislature), the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Mr. Giorgio Silli, replied to a parliamentary question on the protests in Iran by also referring to the sanctions adopted by Italy, together with its European Union partners, against those Iranian entities and individuals who are “responsible for the death of Mahsa Amini and the violent repression of protests that followed”. According to Mr. Silli, these sanctions were reportedly taken not only as a reaction to human rights violations by the Iranian Government, but also “for the violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity, in connection with the supply of Iranian drones to Russia, used in the conflict in Ukraine”. Given that the supply of arms can hardly be qualified as a direct violation of territorial integrity, it is likely that Undersecretary Silli intended to qualify the Iranian behaviour as a form of complicity in the Russian aggression against Ukraine (Article 16 of the International Law Commission Articles on State Responsibility), or in any case as a violation of the duty not to assist the aggressor State (Article 41). It is crucial, moreover, to highlight that Iran has neither signed nor ratified the Arms Trade Treaty and thus no specific conventional obligations on trade in arms can be invoked.
In a further reaction to the Iranian Government’s harsh suppression of protests, on 22 March 2023 (51st Meeting, XIX Legislature), the Italian Senate unanimously passed a resolution (Doc. XXIV, No. 1) expressing support for the demonstrators. As already done in the past with regard to other countries,[3] the Parliament unequivocally condemned Iran’s excessive use of force, describing it as “characterized by rigidity, as well as indiscriminate, disproportionate and unnecessary”, “unjustifiable” and, citing Human Rights Watch’s stance, “excessive and illegal”. According to the resolution, these qualifications are justified by the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, and despite the fact that they soon turned into mass protests aimed “at a change of the current theocratic system”. Thus, it appears that the peaceful character of demonstrations does not admit a violent response by the State even when the protesters are questioning the nature of the State itself.
As a consequence, the resolution commits the Italian Government, inter alia, to exert pressure on its Iranian counterpart so that the latter “put an end to the repression and violence against women in the country”. In a wide-ranging preamble, after recalling that Iran is not a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the resolution stresses that Iran “is bound in all cases to respect the principle of non-discrimination, and in particular that of equality between men and women”, which is referred to as a “key principle of the international human rights corpus”, also enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. Whether or not the Senate meant to accord such a principle the status of jus cogens norm remains unclear, though.
Filomena Medea Tulli
A quotable version of this post was published in the Italian Yearbook of International Law: Tulli, “The Legal Limits on the Repression of Protests in Iran and on the Intervention of Third States”, IYIL XXXIII (2023), 2024, pp. 512-513; available here.
[1] “Iranian woman dies ‘after being beaten by morality police’ over hijab law”, The Guardian, 16 September 2022; and “Mapping Iran’s unrest: how Mahsa Amini’s death led to nationwide protests”, The Guardian, 31 October 2022, providing a detailed account of, respectively, the facts that led to Amini’s death and the nationwide protests followed by the Iranian government’s response.
[2] A comprehensive examination of the underlying motivations driving the protesters to mobilize on the streets of Iran is presented in “‘They Have Nothing to Lose’: Why Young Iranians Are Rising Up Once Again”, The New York Times, 24 September 2022.
[3] On this subject, see Turrini and Antoniazzi, “The Non-recognition of the Venezuelan President Between Democratic Standards and the Principle of Non-intervention in the Internal Affairs of Other States”, IYIL, Vol. XXIX, 2019, p. 461 ff..
Italy's Diplomatic and Parliamentary Practice on International Law 