Human rights cannot survive on law alone
By Dr Farinaz Zamani
Dr Farinaz Zamani is an Iranian-Australian human rights lawyer, educator and academic specialising in international and Australian human rights law. This reflection has been written in a personal capacity and views expressed are not connected to or representative of the author’s employment.
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Most people believe in human rights. Not in theory, but in instinct: the sense that people should be able to live without fear, and that some things are simply wrong. Yet that belief is becoming harder to hold.
Across Iran, ordinary people continue to take extraordinary risks to demand something very simple: the ability to live freely and with dignity.
That demand now sits within an even more devastating and complicated moment. Iran is not only shaped by internal repression, but by the violence and instability of war. Human rights law and humanitarian law offer different ways of understanding these realities, but both point us to the same deeper question: whether we are still capable of responding to human suffering with consistency, principle and equal regard for human life.
For more than four decades, public life in Iran has been shaped by cycles of repression and resistance. Each wave has been met with force, yet dissent has never disappeared. It has shifted between visible defiance and quieter forms of refusal. In 2022, the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini sparked nationwide protests. Women removed their headscarves in public. Students spoke out. Families refused to let the names of the dead be erased.
The recent protests and upheaval sit within this same continuum. They were met with severe repression, including mass arrests, the killing of protestors in the thousands, and executions imposed without due process. Seen in isolation, these moments can appear fragmented. Taken together, they reflect a refusal to accept a life without basic freedoms and respect.
In theory, the global language of human rights was built to recognise and protect exactly this. From early expressions of limits on power, such as the Cyrus Cylinder in ancient Persia, often described as the first charter of human rights, to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, humanity has repeatedly returned to a central idea: that all people are entitled to live with freedom, equality and respect.
That promise is what gives human rights their moral force. But moments like the continued repression of people by the Iranian regime expose a growing tension within that promise.
We are living in a moment where conversations about human suffering are increasingly fractured by politics, allegiance and proximity. Across repression, protest and armed conflict, responses to violations often appear uneven, shaped as much by power and narrative as by principle. In that environment, human rights can become something we argue about, rather than something we collectively uphold. Attention comes in waves, with some violations generating sustained outrage while others fade quickly from view.
Over time, this unevenness affects the credibility of the human rights project itself, the effort to translate the idea of equal worth into laws, institutions and practice. When protection, outrage and empathy are applied selectively, whether in response to state repression or the civilian toll of war, it begins to undermine the idea that these principles truly apply to everyone, everywhere.
Beneath all of this lies a quieter question: why should what is happening somewhere else matter here? That is precisely where the idea of universal human rights is most seriously tested. If human rights only matter when they are close to us, familiar to us, or aligned with our own values and beliefs, then they were never truly universal to begin with.
This is not only about how we respond to events elsewhere. It is about how each of us understands human rights, and whether we are willing to extend that understanding beyond our own borders, beliefs and affiliations.
For decades, the human rights project has focused heavily on legal frameworks. Treaties, courts and international bodies have sought to define and protect rights. But law alone cannot sustain belief in human rights. What we are seeing now is not just a legal challenge, but a cultural one.
The strength of human rights has always depended on something deeper than law: a shared understanding, and a shared human instinct, that every person’s life has equal worth. When that understanding and instinct are strong, legal frameworks are reinforced. When they weaken, the law begins to feel distant, even contested.
Inside Iran, people continue to assert that understanding through lived experience, despite enormous risk. Their actions raise a deeper question: what happens when the moral clarity of people on the ground contrasts with the inconsistency of the global conversation around them?
This is not the first time humanity has faced such a moment. The idea of human rights has evolved in response to crisis, injustice and the limits of existing systems. Again and again, societies have been forced to return to the same question: what do we owe one another? Each time, the answer has required more than new laws. It has required a renewal of the values beneath them. That may be what this moment is asking of us now.
Because the conditions that protect rights are not permanent. Institutions, norms and safeguards do not sustain themselves. They rely on public understanding, trust and participation. Without that, the distance between societies that protect rights and those that do not is not as great as we might assume.
If the idea of universal human rights is to endure, rebuilding its legitimacy may depend less on expanding legal frameworks and more on strengthening the shared understanding that gives those frameworks meaning.
This is where education becomes central, not in the narrow sense of legal knowledge, but in the broader sense of building awareness, empathy and shared humanity. This matters especially in moments like this, when public responses to suffering are so easily shaped by conflict, distance and allegiance. Human rights literacy is often treated as something specialised, confined to legal experts or institutions.
In reality, it shapes how people understand power, responsibility and the worth of others, and whether injustice is recognised, challenged or quietly accepted. That work does not sit with one institution alone. It is shared across governments, schools, communities, media and individuals. It is what allows people to recognise injustice, even when it does not affect them directly, and see it as something that demands a response.
The people of Iran are already asserting that truth with courage and clarity. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to meet it, and to do so with a renewed commitment to the shared humanity that gives human rights their meaning.
About the author
Dr Farinaz Zamani
Dr Farinaz Zamani is a human rights lawyer, educator and academic specialising in international and Australian human rights law. Having migrated to Australia from Iran as a teenager, she brings both lived experience and more than 20 years of professional expertise to her work across law, education and public sector reform. Farinaz is a 2025 Churchill Fellow researching international models of human rights education in South Africa, Canada, Finland and Norway.
You want to experience repression then come to the west