On July 1, 2024, at the Free Iran 2024 World Summit – Day 3 hosted at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) headquarters in Paris, renowned human rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz delivered a powerful speech.
Mr. Dershowitz praised Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan, describing it as one of the best human rights documents he has ever read. He emphasized that if implemented, it would provide Iranians with a future of freedom and democracy, a stark contrast to the current regime’s history of crimes against humanity.
1. Renowned Human Rights Lawyer @AlanDersh Calls for Regime Change in Iran and International Action to Prevent Nuclear Threat #MaryamRajavi4FreeIran #FreeIran2024 https://t.co/DVbB1BF4gb
— Iran Freedom (@4FreedominIran) July 1, 2024
The full text of Alan Dershowitz’s speech follows:
It is a great honor to speak before such a distinguished audience of people, seeking such a distinguished and great result, justice.
I want to dedicate this speech, this talk, to my dear friend Joe Lieberman, who many of you know. Joe and I were actually working together on a human rights op-ed for the Wall Street Journal just hours before he fell and then subsequently died. It was one of the great tragedies of modern times. Joe could have lived a great and productive life, but tragically he was taken away from us.
I have such a strong identification with Joe that yesterday I fell. I was taking pictures for the MEK, and the former Attorney General of the United States, Mike Mukasey, slipped and fell and knocked me over. Fortunately, I only tore my hamstring. I only wish that that had been the result of Joe’s fall, but tragically it was not. Joe, I can tell you, I would be so thrilled to be here today, particularly in light of the Ten-Point Plan that has been put forward and has been read to you. I’m not going to read it to you, but I’m going to say to you, this is one of the best human rights documents I have ever been privileged to read. It combines all the best elements of the American Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, the unwritten Constitution in Great Britain, and constitutions all through Europe, and South America.
If the people of Iran were able to live under these ten points, they would be so grateful. I can’t imagine anybody, anybody, an ordinary citizen of Iran, who would not accept these ten points and would not want to live under them. It’s just an amazing agenda for real democracy and light not only unto the region but unto the world.
What we are urging, and what these ten points urge, is not a return to the tyrannies of the past, whether the distant past or the recent past. What we want is a future. The past was filled with a long litany of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Iranian people, crimes against women, crimes against dissidents, crimes against children, and crimes against people of every possible background. And that has to come to an end, and it has to come to an end now. And these programs that are put forward in this ten-point program is a road map. It’s a road map for the future of a free Iran.
The status quo is unacceptable. It’s extremely dangerous to the world. It’s extremely dangerous to the people of Iran. We need change, and we need it now. There are two options. One option is reform. The other option is regime change. Now, regime change can come from many sources. It would be far better if regime change came from within. But if it doesn’t come from within, it has to come from outside.
Let me tell you a story about what happened in the mid-1930s. As you know, the Nazis came to power, and the British and the French considered what to do when the Nazis violated the Versailles Treaty. And this is what Goebbels, the head of propaganda for the Nazis, wrote in his diary. He said, in 1933, a French Premier ought to have said, and if I had been the French premier, I would have said, the new Reich Chancellor, Hitler, is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, says this and that. The man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march. But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us sift through the dangerous zone, and we were able to go around all the dangerous reefs.
I hope and pray that someday a mullah will not write that in his diary, saying there was an opportunity for outside forces, for international courts, for the United States, for others, to bring about regime change because the current regime is intolerable. But they didn’t do it. And look at the result. And none of us can predict the result.
We talked about the difficulty of predicting what happened when the wall came down. Imagine how much more difficult it is to predict whether or not Iran would use a nuclear arsenal against any countries in the region or against even countries outside the region. It’s impossible to predict that.
They’ve certainly said they would use it against at least one country. In fact, one of the leaders of Iran some years ago said, if we develop a nuclear bomb and we bomb Israel, which is a one-bomb state, they will retaliate and bomb Tehran. They will kill 10 million Muslims. We will kill 3 million Jews, he said. But the tradeoff would be worth it because the Jewish state would have been decimated and Islam would still survive.
Can you allow people who have that attitude to have access to nuclear weapons? Of course not. Of course not. And so there must be regime change. There must be, not only primarily for the sake of the Iranian people but for the sake of the region, for the sake of world peace, for the sake of basic decency.
The world cannot tolerate in 2024 the mullahs of Iran any more than the world should have tolerated in 1933, 34, and 35, the Nazis of Germany. Had the Nazi regime been defeated in 1935, there wouldn’t have been 50 million deaths, but nobody would have known it at the time, and the people who wrote about regime change would have been called war criminals or war mongers because history is blind to the future.
We don’t know what a nuclear-armed Iran would do, but we have to base our decision on the possibilities in here, in giving people and regimes and extremists of that kind access to nuclear weapons, which they then can give to their surrogates because Iran operates through surrogates.
Now, one of our speakers talked about international courts. I really do think that a case should be opened by the International Criminal Court against the mullahs of Iran, naming specific people who were involved in decisions to commit genocide, to commit war crimes, and to commit acts of aggression against other countries. And remember one thing, Iran cannot claim complementarity.
Remember that the International Criminal Court has a concept called complementarity. That is, you can’t investigate a country if that country has the willingness and the ability to investigate itself and to bring legitimate charges against people in its own country who have violated the international laws of war. Iran could never satisfy that test of complementarity because it has no judicial system. It has no legal system. It has no due process. There’s no possibility that the mullahs would ever be put on trial, no matter how many horrible things they’ve done. The best proof is they’ve done all these horrible things and they have never been put on trial.
And so, the question is appeasement, and that’s what we’re doing today. Our government, the United States government, is appeasing Iran. It is not implementing the sanctions. It is not putting pressure on Iran, either domestically or internationally. And so, it’s so important to up the pressure, legally, economically, politically, diplomatically.
You know, I’m often asked, if am I a pessimist or an optimist about Iran and about the world in general, because the world is in a very dangerous situation today. And I recall an old joke that says that a pessimist is someone who says, oh, things are so bad they can’t possibly get worse. And the optimist says, yes, they can. And so, the question is, am I an optimist or am I a pessimist? I think things can get worse.
If Iran is permitted to develop a nuclear arsenal, things will get worse. They will be much more dangerous than any country with nuclear weapons, far more dangerous than the hermit kingdom of North Korea, which has no interest really in spreading terrorism around the world. The same is true of other countries. But Iran has as a religious principle the idea that it has to spread its terrorism. It is the greatest exporter of terrorism in modern times.
So, unless things change, unless we absolutely devote ourselves to ending this horrible regime and bringing real democracy, real democracy, the 10-point program democracy to the people of Iran, things will get worse. We cannot allow that to happen.
Thank you.
