By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

Iran is routinely portrayed in Western media as a dark mirror of everything the “civilised world” rejects: a state that jails protesters, represses women, and defies international norms. Yet the governments most eager to condemn Tehran’s abuses are themselves deeply entangled in illegal wars, collective punishment, and systematic violations of human rights at home and abroad.​ The loudest voices denouncing Iran are not neutral arbiters. Washington and key European capitals routinely present themselves as champions of Iranian women and protesters, even as they maintain economic sanctions that exacerbate ordinary people’s hardship, restrict access to medicines, and deepen inequality. Human rights language thus becomes a tool of pressure on an adversary, not a consistent principle applied to friend and foe alike.

US and Western leaders speak the language of human rights in Tehran while trampling those same norms in Gaza, Caracas, and at their own borders. The gap between their rhetoric on Iran and their conduct at home and abroad is not a contradiction they stumble into; it is the logic of an imperial double standard.​ US officials routinely invoke “rules-based order” when denouncing Iran’s repression or regional interventions, yet Washington has openly attacked the very institutions meant to uphold international law. When the International Criminal Court began probing possible Israeli genocide /war crimes in Gaza, those complicit in the Trump administration responded by sanctioning its top prosecutor and other ICC officials, an act Human Rights Watch called a “shameful new low” and a perversion of sanctions designed for humanrights abusers.

Trump has been unusually blunt in articulating this arrogance. In a recent interview about his aggressive global policies, he said: “I don’t require international law. I am not intending to harm individuals,” adding that following it “depends on what your definition of international law is.” At the same time, his administration used overwhelming force in places like Venezuela and Iran, combining military strikes with sweeping sanctions that UN experts and rights groups warn amount to collective punishment. When a sitting US president publicly suggests that only his personal morality limits his power (his morality!my foot!), while ordering strikes and economic sieges that devastate civilian populations, the West’s sermons to Iran about “respecting international law” begin to sound grotesque.​

Human rights at home: ICE as a law unto itself

US lectures to Iran about prisoners, due process and dignity also ring hollow against the reality of its own immigration and detention system. Investigations into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities—often run by private contractors—consistently document conditions that violate both ICE’s own standards and international humanrights obligations. These abuses breach key treaties the US has ratified, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture, as well as minimum standards such as the Mandela Rules. Yet ICE operates with vast discretionary power and limited accountability, effectively a law unto itself, while Washington lectures Iran about arbitrary detention and Ill-treatment. Recently, they blatantly killed a civilian in broad daylight, too. The same government that maintains the brutal torture chambers in Guantánamo Bay and cages asylum-seekers in degrading conditions and separates families at the border still dares to present itself as a moral authority on human rights in the Middle East.​

Gaza: livestreamed atrocities and Western complicity

The hypocrisy becomes most glaring in Gaza, where the US, UK and Germany have offered diplomatic cover, weapons and political legitimacy to Israel’s devastating campaign while claiming to defend a “rulesbased order.” Nicaragua has also taken Germany to the ICJ for complicity in Gaza Genocide, for aggressively supporting Israel. The US has repeatedly used or threatened its veto at the UN Security Council to block or water down ceasefire resolutions, and continues to send weapons even as UN judges warn of a “plausible” risk of genocide in a parallel case brought by South Africa. London, after a brief rhetorical wobble, has largely followed Washington’s line. These are the same governments that invoke “human rights” when condemning Iran’s treatment of protesters or prisoners, yet they enable a campaign of mass killing, siege and displacement broadcast in real time to the world.​

Western leaders also demand that Iran respect peaceful protests while cracking down on their own populations when those protests challenge Israeli impunity. In the US, pro-Palestinian campus encampments have faced mass arrests, suspensions and politically driven inquiries, with lawmakers smearing student protesters as antisemitic simply for calling for a ceasefire, boycott or divestment. In the UK, police have used broad public-order powers to monitor, restrict and sometimes arrest demonstrators, while ministers flirt with banning chants or symbols they deem “hate,” despite the protests’ overwhelmingly peaceful character and explicit opposition to antisemitism.​ Germany represents one of the most extreme examples. Over nearly two years, authorities have waged a rolling crackdown on Palestine solidarity: banning events, blocking speakers and even barring a UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, from speaking in Berlin. In other words, three governments that condemn Tehran for repressing dissent have harassed, surveilled and criminalised their own citizens and residents for standing up for Palestinian rights and calling Israeli actions what they appear to be under international law.​

Iran under sanctions: punished yet resilient

In this landscape, Iran occupies a paradoxical position. Washington and its allies subject Iran to sweeping unilateral sanctions far beyond Security Council mandates, measures that economists and UN experts say have crippled its economy and harmed ordinary people’s access to medicine, food and essential goods. These “maximum pressure” campaigns are justified in the name of human rights and nuclear non-proliferation, yet in practice, they often function as collective punishment, pushing millions deeper into poverty while strengthening hardliners.​ Despite this, Iran has endured and adapted. During the recent twelve-day war between Iran and Israel, analysts observed that Israel sustained more damage from Iranian missiles in twelve days than it had from two years of Hamas rockets or from months of war with Hezbollah, underscoring both Iran’s military growth under sanctions and Israel’s vulnerabilities when facing a capable state adversary rather than a besieged population.​

The irony is sharp: while the West claims that sanctions and pressure are about enforcing international law and stability, its chosen ally, Israel, has engaged in massively destructive wars and a prolonged occupation, and its sanctioned adversary, Iran, has emerged as a central regional power with advanced missile and drone industries. The “law-abiding” camp bombs Gaza into rubble with Western support; the “rogue” camp proves capable of hitting Tel Aviv and strategic sites deep inside Israel, exposing the limits of Western-backed deterrence.​

Moral language for Iran, impunity for allies

US and European officials speak passionately about Iranian women’s rights, the death penalty and the crackdown on protests—yet the same officials are muted or evasive about their allies’ abuses. Iran’s ‘violent repression of the protests was condemned, but when Israeli forces shoots down unarmed Palestinian protesters for example at Gaza’s Great March of Return sometime back, killing and maiming hundreds, Western governments limited themselves to vague calls for restraint. Iran’s prisons are denounced, while Egyptian torture chambers, Saudi beheadings and Gulf monarchies’ crushing of dissent attract much milder criticism due to their status as Western partners.

The double standard is not whether abuses exist in Iran—they do. In fact, the Iranian regime should take serious note of people’s genuine frustrations and aspirations and take remedial steps to address them.  But what irritates observers is whether similar or worse abuses by allies provoke comparable outrage, sanctions and legal action. It is this selectivity that drains Western humanrights discourse of credibility. When the US openly sanctions ICC prosecutors for investigating its own forces while demanding that the same court target Iranian or Russian officials, it is not “defending human rights”; it is weaponising law as an instrument of power. When Germany is dragged before the ICJ for aiding Israel’s assault on Gaza while blocking Palestinian voices at home, it is not “learning from history”; it is repeating the logic that some lives matter more than others.​

The Gaza–Iran mirror

The twelve-day Iran–Israel war and the Gaza campaign mirror each other in exposing Western hypocrisy. In Gaza, Israel inflicted “Gazastyle” destruction on civilian neighbourhoods with Western weapons and diplomatic backing; in Tel Aviv and other cities, Israelis suddenly experienced something closer to what their state has long inflicted on others, this time from Iranian missiles. As one analyst put it, Israeli crews “came to grips with the sort of damage to apartment blocks that before only Israeli planes had inflicted on Gaza.” For decades, the West accepted as normal that this level of devastation could be visited upon Palestinians or Lebanese civilians; when Iran demonstrated that it could reach into Israel itself, Western officials rediscovered their concern for “regional stability.”​

It is not argued that Iran is a human rights model. But the point is that Western powers do not oppose Iran because it violates human rights; they oppose it because it resists the US-led order, challenges Israeli military dominance, and refuses to subordinate its regional role to Washington’s preferences. Human rights are the language used to sell strategies rooted in power, not the true guide of policy. If human rights were the real compass, Gaza’s starving children, Yemen’s bombed weddings, ICE’s freezing cells and the ICC’s harassed prosecutors would also be at the centre of Western concern, not collateral damage of “security” and “great-power competition.”​

One law or none

Exposing this hypocrisy is not about excusing Iranian abuses or glorifying any state’s military power. It is about insisting that international law and human rights must be universal, or they are nothing. Either Trump is wrong, and international law binds the US as much as Iran, Israel and any other state—or Trump is right in practice, and what exists is not law but an imperial license, limited only by power and “morality” as defined by the strong.​

As long as Washington can sanction judges for investigating its soldiers, arm Israel as it devastates Gaza, allow ICE to run detention centres in conditions that violate basic treaties, kidnap foreign leaders and threaten to take over foreign lands, but still lecture Tehran about the “rule of law,” talk of a “rules-based order” will sound like a bitter joke. And as long as the US, UK and Germany, for example, harass and criminalise people protesting for Palestine while praising protests in Iran, their words about freedom and dignity will carry the hollow echo of hypocrisy.

Strengthening the international order and the UN requires both structural reform and genuine political will from powerful states. International law must be applied consistently with no more special exemptions for great powers or their allies. If this hypocrisy is not confronted and international law made truly universal, our next generation will inherit a world where the law of the jungle prevails, might becomes right, and the so-called rules-based order survives only as words in law books, stripped of real power.