How to secure Iran’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity was a fraught issue at the end of the Second World War. With the Anglo-Soviet invasion of August 1941, the forced abdication of Reza Shah Pahlevi, and the intensification of political, ethnic, religious, linguistic and ideological rivalry during the war years, this old concern became the most contentious of political riddles. At this crucial historical juncture, Iranian lawyers, diplomats, academics and institutions increasingly recognized the pragmatic utility of the constitutionally sanctioned “equality rights” law-and-order mode of governance articulated during the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1909). However, for forty years this framework—first secured in Articles VIII and IX of the 1907 Supplementary Constitutional Law—had lain dormant. In the postwar period, and via the new forum provided by the UN, they would become politically active once again.
This paper explores how a generation of Iranian lawyers and diplomats aligned Articles VIII and IX with the founding documents of the United Nations: the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the 1942 United Nations Declaration and the 1945 United Nations Charter. With the ratification of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles VIII and IX were increasingly constituted as fundamental principles for legal, social and political conduct in post-WWII Iran. To give further impetus to their arguments for this “equality rights” framework, Iranian lawyers fused the equal rights and equal protection focus of these articles to the Cyrus Cylinder, transforming this artifact of 539 BCE into a founding document for the articulation of global human rights. They also established a narrative of civilizational continuity between pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran by linking what they called a “the Cyrusian ethos of equality” to Perso-Islamic mystical humanism. As this paper argues, this civilizational narrative, crafted by these lawyers, was the basis on which Iran secured the hosting of the first international UN conference on human rights in 1968.
