“I had a stark choice: to exercise my freedom to become a bystander, or to commit my life to struggling for justice.”
That’s the difficult decision Payam Akhavan — this year’s CBC Massey Lecturer — had to make after fleeing the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s for Canada, where he had his awakening to human rights.
That awakening came when he was a teenager, and heard what had happened to Mona Mahmudnizhad, a young woman around his age from the Iranian Bahai community in Tehran.
Mona had been assigned in school to write an essay about religious freedom. She was expected to praise the government, but instead used the essay to speak out about her lack of freedom.
“After she wrote that essay, the authorities raided her home,” Akhavan explains in the first of his lectures. “They arrested her and her father. Her mother begged them not to take her daughter, saying she is just a child. And they produced the essay and they said the person who wrote this essay is not a child.”
Mona and her father were put in prison, where they were tortured for several months. In June 1983, she was killed alongside nine other Iranian Bahai women. Mona was hanged on a polo field, the same place where her father had been executed.
Yet even in those final moments, she showed courage and rebellion.
“We know that when Mona was on the gallows that she, with the noose around her neck, smiled at her executioner in a final act of defiance,” Akhavan said. “This just shattered my world. It completely changed the course of my life.”
Akhavan went on to become a famed human rights lawyer and scholar; he is a former UN prosecutor and has served as legal counsel before the International Court of Justice and the Supreme Courts in Canada and the U.S.
His work with the UN put him in front of some of the worst human rights struggles, on the ground in Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor.
He touches on many of these human rights abuses, and what can be done to help out, as part of his lectures, optimistically named In Search of a Better World. This first lecture was delivered in Whitehorse.
Source » cbc