If they stood before some imaginary tribunal tasked with guarding human rights, Iran’s leaders would undoubtedly face a formidable indictment. As the June 7th report of Human Rights Watch organization made amply clear, the present regime continues to perpetrate some very gruesome deeds, even though the seven-year tenure of President Mohammed Khatami has supposedly championed ‘reform’ and ‘openness.’

But to argue that this disturbing state of affairs somehow justifies the outside world pushing its own overtly humanitarian agenda onto the Islamic Republic is, however, a very large leap of logic. Yet with an eye on a two-day conference in Tehran that began on 14 June, for example, Human Rights Watch nonetheless recently urged European Union diplomats to “take a much stronger approach in the upcoming EU-Iran human rights dialogue than they have in previous meetings with the Iranian government.”

Even the most ardent liberal humanitarian should acknowledge the futility of such an approach. The EU has been pushing a human rights agenda over the same period that Iran’s record on this matter is said to have deteriorated, so it is hard to see why further diplomatic pressure should suddenly start having the desired effect. Nor has this marked deterioration been offset by any concrete achievement, since the European Union’s ‘critical dialogue’ with Tehran, which began as long ago as 1995, has achieved nothing substantial: propaganda from Brussels has previously boasted of “considerable progress” on this count but ask any Western diplomat in Tehran and they won’t know what this progress is.

The uncomfortable truth is that it is a contradiction in terms for one country to enforce ‘human rights’ on a reluctant sovereign state. To do so, the foreign power would also need to control the police, armed forces and judiciary upon which the enforcement of any domestic law clearly depends, and if one state surrenders those powers then it is clearly no longer ‘sovereign.’

Humanitarian criticism of Iran, or any other country, is instead likely to prompt superficial changes by a government seeking to deflect diplomatic and economic pressure. But it won’t suddenly stop the offending practices from taking place.

Consider, for example, the meaningless declaration made recently by the head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. “Any torture to extract a confession is banned and the confessions extracted through torture are not legitimate and legal,” he argued on 28 April as he delivered a 15-point directive that acknowledged the scale of abuses inside Iran.

Try telling ordinary Iranians that this directive has made any real difference and, as Human Rights Watch would be the first to admit, you won’t be taken too seriously.  Without any means of fairly enforcing it, the directive was of course just a quick cosmetic makeover to impress European suitors at a time when, after the sweeping conservative gains in the February elections, Iran hardly basked in international admiration.

Those who remain convinced that outside pressure can improve Iran’s dire human rights record should also admit that such superficial changes are likely only to deflect the very international pressure that is supposed to orchestrate genuine reform. Thinking that their efforts have reaped dividends, the ‘international community’ is tempted to lower its glance and look elsewhere, and anyone who doubts this need look no further than the ‘spin’ phenomenon prevalent in Western politics: our own politicians have cynically used pleasing headlines to deceive even the most rational and educated amongst their electorate.

There is another, better known, reason why liberal humanitarianism proves counter-productive. While every country instinctively recoils from unwarranted foreign interference, Iran has more reason to do so than most, having endured thousands of years of invasion and foreign rule by the armies of, amongst others, Alexander the Great, the Arab tribes, the Ottoman janissaries, the Mongol hordes and the Russian Tsars. This means that resentment at foreign intervention continues to run deep, and criticism of Iran's domestic policies can often prompt otherwise bickering political factions to unite against the new foreign threat with equal indignation.

When thousands of mainly student protestors took to the streets of Tehran last summer, statements of support by the White House merely complicated an already difficult situation and allowed hardliners to portray the demonstrators as traitors: “it would have been much better if the Americans had just stood back and let things take their own course,” as a senior Western diplomat in Tehran admitted last to me last autumn.

The unhappy truth is that the only the Iranian people can engineer genuine changes inside Iran and our own interference, no matter how well-intentioned, is essentially misguided. Let’s leave Iran to the Iranians.

Roger Howard is the author of Iran in Crisis? Nuclear Ambitions and the American Response.

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