The Goler T. Butcher Medal Lecture Award was first awarded in 1997. It is awarded to a distinguished person of American or other nationality for outstanding contributions to the development or effective realization of international human rights. It is named for Goler Teal Butcher, a prominent African-American scholar and professor at Howard University School of Law, who also worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Carter administration, where she committed a lot of her time and efforts to the elimination of global hunger.
I am proud to introduce this year's eminent awardee, Roya Boroumand.
Roya, you will be presented with your medal formally later this afternoon at the assembly. But let me just say a few words now about Roya. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, which is a non-governmental organization dedicated to the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran. The organization was established in the memory of her late father, Abdorrahman Boroumand, a critic of both the Shah and Khomeini regimes. Her father was assassinated in April 1991 by Iranian government agents in Paris.
Drawing on the values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Boroumand Center is dedicated to promoting public awareness of issues concerning democracy and human rights in Iran. Through its programs of research, documentation, publications, and outreach, the center hopes to help restore the dignity of Iran's countless victims of human rights violations. Among its many projects is an internet database that catalogs the victims of summary, arbitrary, and extrajudicial executions carried out by the Islamic Republic.
Ms. Boroumand has served as a source of rigorous, objective documentation aimed at achieving justice and accountability under international law, leveraging the UN human rights system to expose and stigmatize abuses carried out by the Iranian government and defending universal human rights and the rule of law in the difficult context of a theocracy.
With this award, the American Society of International Law honors the excellence of her human rights work, her significant contributions to the implementation of international law, and her tireless perseverance in the quest for justice in Iran.
Roya will be in conversation with Karima Bennoune, who herself will be awarded the WILIG Prominent Woman in International Law Award at a luncheon tomorrow. Karima is the Lewis M. Simes Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to that, she served as a UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, and she was appointed as an expert for the International Criminal Court in 2017 during the reparations phase of the case of the Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi. As a former legal advisor for Amnesty International, Karima has also carried out human rights missions in most regions of the world. Her recent work has focused on supporting the efforts of Afghan women human rights defenders to counter gender apartheid in Afghanistan. In September, 2023, she spoke at the UN Security Council about this important topic.
Thank you, Roya, thank you, Karima, for this conversation to which we so look forward.
Thank you very much for those kind introductions, Greg, and thank you all for coming today. It is a profound honor for me to have this conversation with one of the human rights defenders that I admire the most, the 2024 Goler Butcher Medal winner, Roya Boroumand. I am going to say a few words, and then Roya will give some opening remarks. Then we will have a conversation, and then we very much look forward to your questions.
I have to start by saying, in my view, there simply could not be a more deserving recipient of the Goler Butcher Medal. She is brilliant, courageous, and a strategic advocate who has dedicated her life's work to addressing one of the most challenging human rights situations in the world. Often using international law as her vehicle, she has worked tirelessly—and I literally mean tirelessly—to defend human rights in Iran. Roya's efforts in support of frontline Iranian human rights defenders have been especially important and difficult since the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini sparked nationwide protests eighteen months ago. She has advocated for the establishment of critically important mechanisms to address what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has called a “full-fledged human rights crisis” in Iran. This has included writing and supervising production of vital documents about the repression of protesters and the applicable international law and campaigning for the rights of Iranian human rights lawyers working in what is an extremely difficult environment using international law to bolster this work.
In Roya's own words, “how can the international community expect human rights improvements in a context where rights defenders, those who call for change, are arrested, and the lawyers defending them are persecuted?” Roya founded what is now known as the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, of which she is the Executive Director, along with her sister, Ladan, in memory of their late father. And I should mention that the killings of Mr. Boroumand and others are crimes for which Roya continues to push for justice, which takes a particular perseverance. One of the things I admire so much about her is the fortitude it must take to start an organization to promote democracy and human rights in Iran when your own father was slain for doing exactly that.
Roya's riposte was to defend the rights of all Iranian victims of human rights violations in accordance with international law. Her response to the violence that so gravely affected her own family has taken the form of a sustained campaign of precision human rights fact-finding and advocacy using international human rights standards. She was one of the first Iranian human rights defenders (and she is the first to say that she is part of a very big movement for human rights inside and outside of the country), but she was one of the first Iranian human rights defenders to recognize the centrality of objective, rigorous documentation for legal advocacy, for policy change, and for efforts aimed at achieving accountability. Her work has inspired grassroots human rights groups inside Iran with whom she works very closely. They say that out of tragedy, she created hope.
Under Roya's leadership, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center has effectively pushed for stronger action on Iran by the UN Human Rights system, serving as one of the most accurate and reliable sources of information for UN experts and mechanisms—and I can say this with firsthand experience—and contributing to the successful lobby to eject Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women due to its gross violations of women's rights.
She has followed in the footsteps of Goler Butcher, for whom the prize she receives today is named. Echoing Ms. Butcher's own work in being unrelenting in her commitment to the realization of international human rights law for those who are too often seen to be beyond its reach. Roya's work is a testament to the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, demanding recognition of the simple but overlooked fact that Iranians too are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
My friends and colleagues, it is a tremendous privilege to give the floor to Roya Boroumand.
Thank you very much, Professor Bennoune, for this amazing tribute that I certainly do not deserve alone. I am profoundly honored and humbled to receive the Goler T. Butcher Medal, which I see as a recognition of the courage, hard work, and commitment of many individuals of diverse nationalities, ethnicities, faiths, and political beliefs who have contributed to our achievement. It is also a tribute to thousands of victims, survivors, and witnesses inside and outside Iran who came forward to testify and without whom a documentation of this magnitude would not have been possible.
Twenty-three years ago, when my sister and I started the Iran Human Rights Memorial Project, we could have never imagined the impact it would have. For two volunteers working out of my bedroom, this project was rather ambitious, a first of its kind. Our ambition was to address the past and the legacy of hate resulting from decades of state violence, impact the present, and prepare for the transition before there was any perspective for transition in Iran. Our goal was to engage generations of survivors and victims of all backgrounds and society at large in a common truth-telling endeavor and to strengthen and empower ordinary people and civil society to claim their rights. From our personal experience, we knew that there was a need to acknowledge the harm done and that time was not on our side. We knew that the challenges we faced were significant, but we were not aware of the magnitude of the crimes we would have to document, and we had not anticipated the massive positive response of those who had lost loved ones.
Our ambition would have remained just that, an ambition, had our paths not crossed those of individuals here in the United States and Europe who trusted our vision and commitment and contributed to this project, helping us with funding, advice, volunteer work, connections, and technology. We were given a sophisticated database. We did not even know what the database was, and I will spare you the details.
We work with lawyers occasionally. One of our reports has recently contributed to the prosecution and conviction in Sweden of an assistant prosecutor working in a prison for his participation in a crime against humanity. We also work as historians—historians with an understanding of international law that could definitely use some improvement. Karima told me not to say that.
The fact that international law experts noticed us and recognized our work is a very meaningful honor. International human rights law matters, and your work has inspired and guided ours.
Being honored here in Washington, D.C. also has a particular significance for me personally. I arrived here in the early 1990s at a time when the Islamic Republic had become the focus of Iran experts and policymakers, when scores of dissidents, writers, and religious figures in Iran and beyond were assassinated, most often with impunity. Among them was my own father.
Away from my immediate family, I was left grappling with profound grief and many questions. I attended many events related to Iran. I heard Iran experts, academics, and sometimes human rights advocates point out the moderation of an Iranian president whose teams of assassins were busy killing his opponents.
There were, of course, people who heard and understood us, but justice and accountability for egregious human rights violations against Iranians seemed, for the most part, irrelevant. And people like me? We were invisible, if not a nuisance. It was almost easier to reconcile with the loss of my father, a man who knowingly chose a dangerous path, than to confront the disheartening reality that our lives seemed inconsequential in a democracy founded on shared values. The loneliness and helplessness I felt during those days was shared by my family and countless others. The Omid Memorial English pages are, to some extent, rooted in that experience. Thanks to these pages, the victims reappear and question the conscience of the perpetrators, of the Iranian people, and of humanity at large.
If I am standing here today, it is because we have come a long way since the early 1990s, but we are facing new challenges, and the fight for universal human rights is far from over. I am truly grateful to ASIL for recognizing the relevance of our documentation efforts and our commitment to upholding the rule of law and human rights. Your acknowledgement strengthens my determination to fight for equal rights and dignity and to continue to seek justice for the countless victims of arbitrary, summary, and extrajudicial executions.
Thank you very much.
Karima Bennoune
Thank you so much for those moving words. Let us start with some general questions about your work and the background of your organization. When I first met you, you told me that you named the foundation after your father because you thought you have to send a message to those that killed, that “Physically eliminating people doesn't eliminate their ideas. These names are going to come and haunt you.” I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what you meant by that, and how you set up this organization, and why.
Roya Boroumand
I would say there were many elements that came together when we set up the organization. There was our personal history, the 1979 revolution history, the revolution of technology, the changes in Iran, and the young Iranians being less ideological and more forward-looking to change, basically.
My sister and I created this organization to ensure that the thousands, if not tens of thousands of victims of the violation of the right to life are not forgotten and to understand for ourselves and for the society at large, why this is happening, how this is happening, and what is the nature of these violations.
It was our goal to advocate and impact international opinion. We did not think at the time that we would be doing United Nations work, and we did not think we would grow beyond a database and a memorial. We had an educational purpose. We wanted Iranians who have lost loved ones—and there are many of them—to use this memorial and understand due process of law and understand what rights of their loved one has been violated in these killings.
Naming it after my father is not a practical thing, right? The name is long. It is not easy to pronounce and does not fit well on a business card. But it was necessary because the state not only eliminates dissidents and eliminates those who are in its way, but it also wants their memory to disappear. It does not allow commemorations and funerals and even tombstones are sometimes not tolerated. This, for the state, is to ensure that not only are these people killed, but they never existed. And so we had to. That was our revenge. We had to make sure that this name is coming back to haunt them—and it is coming back to haunt them. Look at the report of the fact-finding mission. It is coming back to haunt them. We are not always very successful, but we have kept our promise.
Karima Bennoune
You also told me about the particular experience of being a human rights defender who lives through the very trauma that you have been documenting, and you are very courageous in speaking about your own experience, which I am sure is difficult. You told me, “you prioritize the victims,and then you experience what you've been theorizing.” I think on the basis of that experience, you then describe the organization as a victim-oriented research and education group. Can you explain what that means and describe your work with victims, especially in light of your own personal experience?
Roya Boroumand
Victims are central in our work because this memorial is not only about accounting for people who have been killed, but knowing who they are, because if we go back to the early years of the revolution, we were students in France, and we saw people executed in tens, hundreds, thousands. If their death was recorded, they were a name on a list, and you did not know who they were, why they were killed. Every group reported their own killing, but they would not talk about others. And no one would talk about the ordinary people who had been drinking or killed for prostitution or other sexual offenses, religious offenses. No one was seeing them.
The genesis of this project goes back to 1981, where we started to look into all these newspapers that were reporting the deaths and getting out information. Under the direction of my sister, a book was published out of all the research we did, and the book was a miniature sample of what we do now with examples of trials and what had gone wrong in those trials. We did that because we knew that someone has to do it. It is not like we love to do it, but no one else was doing it. So someone had to do it. Theoretically, we knew that society needs to acknowledge that there has been harm done and that it is wrong. But it was theoretical.
When our father was killed, it was not theoretical anymore. We knew why victims need to be acknowledged. We knew why justice is important. We knew why society should not move on, because my father has a higher profile than many people who were killed. And yet he was a name in the news, and then people moved on—and society was helpless in preventing killings. The reaction often is to just forget and move on, whether it is guilt or lack of interest, but they move on. But the families stay, and the families never move on. There is no closure. If there is no justice, no acknowledgement, there is no closure.
So this has been the basis of our relationship with victims. And giving them a voice, helping them defend themselves or their families or their friends and why they were killed and why they should not have been killed.
But we try. We try to keep these victims at the center, and it has a cost. It has a cost emotionally for all of us, from the person who interviews to the person who enters information into the database. Everyone suffers a little bit.
But at the same time, it gives you such a power because this person is never going to be forgotten, and this empowers us, empowers them. That is why so many of them have been sending us information. We have thousands of unsolicited emails with information about people who have died. We never dreamt that we could get that many unsolicited responses. It is power for us, but it is also very important, because it is only when you take the time to look at victims and see who they were and what was the context in which they were killed, then the history of the country is like a puzzle of these people and their stories and it starts to make sense because you ask “why did these people have to be eliminated?” Why so many? You look at their personal history and what happened and how they got killed, and then there is a lot better understanding of patterns and of the state's behavior and how this theocracy survives.
Karima Bennoune
I think that is a very powerful reminder for international lawyers, why our work for accountability is so important. That brings me to Omid, the database, which is one of the centerpieces of your work, which you already mentioned, and Omid, of course, means “hope” in Persian. What kind of information does the database contain, and do you have advice for those in other contexts who might wish to create something similar?
Roya Boroumand
Omid is a repository of cases of violations of the right to life and due process. We compile and publicize in two languages, comprehensive information, when possible, on everyone, all those who have been killed by the state, regardless of their gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or political affiliation. Details are included to help restore the memory of the victims and understand the circumstances of their deaths. We look at multiple sources. We try to vacuum up everything that is in open source, and then we try to find witnesses, relatives. It is long and painstaking work, but this database includes the names of perpetrators and biographical information on the victims.
It is our advocacy. This is how we advocate for change, because it is only when you see 1, 2, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000, always without due process, always for the same reasons, then the narrative of the state is much weaker. You can undermine the narrative of the state at the UN, because of patterns for drug-related executions. They say, “It is the West that is flooding our country from Afghanistan with drugs.” Then you look at how many drug offenders had been killed in 1980, 1981, 1985, and 1989, and then this argument does not hold anymore.
This is Omid, and it is obviously the place where people are memorialized, and every time I meet Iranians that I do not know, someone comes to me and says, “I was just randomly typing the name of my uncle or my dad or someone, and I found that page.” This is the role of memory.
Karima Bennoune
If I am right, people can visit Omid by going to https://www.iranrights.org/memorial.
There are massive human rights violations, unfortunately, going on in many places in the world, but can you explain the specificities of struggling for human rights in the particular context of theocracy, where religious justifications are proffered for many of the human rights violations. Do you find that international law and international human rights law specifically provides the tools that you need for challenging violations in this kind of context?
Roya Boroumand
We have nothing but international law to defend human rights and our rights, because in a theocracy, you and the theocrat, you are not on an equal footing for interpreting the law. The law is there, but it is not mandatory to implement it because the representative of God on Earth can decide that, “Well, no.” We had that recently with a protester, right? Mohammad Ghobadlou was executed for the murder of someone who had been hospitalized four or five days after his arrest, and he was bipolar, and the doctor had acknowledged that he did not know anything about his background when he was evaluated. But the Supreme Court quashed the sentence and asked for a proper evaluation, and then the chief justice went around that decision, and he was executed.
In those circumstances, it is like playing chess with a monkey. Plus women cannot be judges. Individuals are not equal before the law. So no matter, you can make some progress. You can make some changes. But at the end of the day, we are in the land of arbitrariness, and there is nothing that you can predict to be safe.
Karima Bennoune
What are some of the biggest challenges in your work? You have already identified very important ones, but I also wondered if cultural relativism, which has been very fashionable in academia in recent years, maybe has a negative impact on your work that you would want to talk about.
Roya Boroumand
Yes, we have many technical challenges, whether it is funding, whether it is accessing people inside the country, like any work outside the country, and fear. Obviously, fear is a big challenge for people to come forward but also for people working with us, even though the fear is not always justified. We are all alive so far. But it is the reality. People are more scared outside the country than people inside the country.
But yes, we could do a lot better. We could get help from experts in academia, and many of them like what we do, but they do not talk to us. It is as if the fact that we are supporting international human rights and we have no shame in doing that is not right. We are supposed to believe in the Sharia law. We are supposed to want something else, but we are who we are. This is really a problem, because again, I say the quality of our work could be much better if we had advice, if we had support. But it is what it is, because academia can be very politicized. We have a joint project that was rejected when executions were at their height, 900, 1,000, with the justification being the nuclear deal. Why does a law school dealing with human rights have to worry about a nuclear deal rather than us?
Human rights are what people are asking for inside the country. If you look at the writings of students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you see the demands for women's rights. This is not only a Western issue—it is existential for women elsewhere. People need this to be safe, to thrive, and they understand it. Not everyone has families outside the country, money to leave the country. Women in Iran have to deal with what they have, most of them, and that is when they realize that international human rights are the tool to get there. Iran ratified the most important, basic conventions with no reservations in 1975. Iran has obligations, and the fact that we are considered often as too Western and not relevant to them is a little bit insulting, but is also just wrong.
I was born in Isfahan, and my grandmother and her mother wore the veil. I can give you a lot of examples of people. One of the young women who came to the UN Human Rights Council session in March 2024 and had been blinded in the protests, she had multiple encounters with the morality patrols. She came from Mamakan, which in Azerbaijan is a small place, and she said, “I had to get out. I had to, because I couldn't stand the chador. I wanted to sit in cafés.” Like, there are no cafés in Mamakan, and yet she wants everything what a young woman here wants. Why shouldn't she?
Karima Bennoune
A very important question. So this brings us to questions related to women, life, freedom, and developments since 2022. Jina Mahsa Amini became a global symbol of women's resistance in Iran. Can you tell us why her killing in September 2022, just before her twenty-third birthday, sparked such a strong response? And give us an update on the investigation into her death.
Roya Boroumand
We talked to many people who were in the protests, many women, and almost without exception, they all said, “We related. It could have been us. It could have been my daughter. It could have been me, my sister.” So that was a very important factor.
I think the outrage brought people to the street when the state tried to cover it up. People were tired of the lies, and it was obvious for them what happened, whether or not it is obvious, but for them it was. The fact that the state is trying to not take responsibility was the last straw. That is why they came out in the street.
I suggest you read the report of the UN fact-finding mission, because they have a section on that. But as far as I know, the prosecutor has said that they are still investigating, even though they have prosecuted Mahsa's lawyer and sentenced him to a prison term, because he is not accepting the medical examiner's report and is calling for an independent investigation. Her parents were prevented from leaving the country to get an award at the EU, and they are under a lot of restrictions to mourn, to have ceremonies. That is how much we know right now.
Karima Bennoune
Can you give us an update on the overall human rights situation now, eighteen months after the start of the protests, including, in particular, the situation of women's human rights?
Roya Boroumand
The protests in the streets have stopped, and people are not getting killed in the streets. The crackdown has been massive in many forms. Tens of thousands of people were arrested. Estimates go certainly higher than 22,000 because that is the chief justice's number. People have been sentenced to suspended prison terms, but also many different ways. Torture and violence have been particularly harsh. We have had reports of rapes. Protests are a fact of life in Iran, like every ten days, every ten years, every five years. Now the space between protests has shrunk, but we never had that many reports of sexual violence, not always rape, and for men and for women.
These are deterrents, but at the same time, the protest has not stopped really. It has just morphed into a new form because whoever comes from Iran says the women do not have scarves. A lot of women are not wearing them, even though there are people who are “guardians of the veil” who are everywhere. And they do arrest people. Maybe they do not arrest people when there is a crowd, but when they find them isolated, they do arrest people. They do punish people. Women are identified in their cars, photographed in their cars, and then they automatically withdraw. They are fined in a country where the economy is not doing well and people struggle with poverty, multiple fines. That is the way they are trying to stop it. They take their student cards, for example, so that they do not have access to the cafeteria or dorms. They have found multiple ways to punish people.
And yet these girls, these women, they do not give up. I know the mother of a friend of mine who was wearing a scarf last time I saw her here a few years ago. She wore the scarf, even here in the United States. She took off the scarf in protest. The fact that the girls who were blinded, people who were tortured are testifying to the UN and are telling us, “Give my testimony.” The fact that some of them came, even though their families are going to be persecuted, that means that the protest has not stopped.
Karima Bennoune
Let me turn to some of the international dimensions. How do you assess the UN's engagement on the human rights situation in Iran, and how has it changed over time? Has it been effective?
Roya Boroumand
Yes, I would say that the UN work on Iran is effective. I think it has changed a lot from the first two decades of the revolution, where there was no access, obviously, and the state did not engage much and did not care much. Access to information was very difficult. You see that the reports are rather minimalist and based on mostly Iranian media, but this has changed. The last Special Rapporteurs have been much more active. Technology has allowed them to be in touch with a lot of people. They have more access. They have been more outspoken. They have talked to the media, which was not the case before, and so that has helped. We have laws that have changed. People did not have lawyers at all in criminal cases, and they were executed the night of their trial.
We have a long way to go, but there are lawyers for people facing the death penalty, and it is mandatory in court, not during interrogation but in court. The age of criminal responsibility has not changed, but some crimes have been eliminated. They are not implemented for children, and there are many things, but not enough for people to be safe.
Iran is engaging way more than before. They have invested enormous resources to engage. They have dialogues with Brazilians. They have dialogues with Japanese. They have dialogue with South Africans on human rights. They have dialogues with everyone. They have technical cooperation. The UN goes there and has technical cooperation about women's rights and executions. We do not know much about how these talks are going and we do not see many results. Sometimes I think that dialogue and engagement has become just for that, that they do not look for results, that talking is success. The more rogue the state, the less objectives and the less results are expected. We are talking for talking, and that is it. Some improvements could be done.
Karima Bennoune
Can I ask specifically about your view of the recently issued initial report from the UN fact-finding mission on Iran? I was very struck by its conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe serious human rights violations have been committed during the protests beginning in September of 2022, that there have been very serious violations of women's rights and especially severe violations also of the rights of minorities and, in fact, that all of this may rise to the level of crimes against humanity. What has been the impact so far of this report?
Roya Boroumand
I think it is too soon to judge, but one impact I think is the Human Rights Council voting for extending the mandate of the fact-finding mission and the rapporteur at the same time with a lot of votes. I think that is definitely a sign that the report has been having an impact.
But generally speaking, the Fact-Finding mission is the best thing that has happened to us in a long time because although the mandate of the Special Rapporteur is very important, the UN does not give enough means to the Special Rapporteurs. They have two or three fact finding missions every year and very limited translation capacity, and the fact-finding mission came with experts and means, and they did an excellent job. For the first time, someone looked at the fact that Iranians were not necessarily happy about the constitution, and they fought to prevent the constitution from being voted on, that there was a cultural revolution. They looked at the context, and that most people do not have the time and the means to do it.
I am very hopeful that understanding the reality of the country will help the international community to be more effective in promoting change in Iran.
Karima Bennoune
Thank you so much, Roya.
