They came early in the morning, about seven o’clock. In Tehran on Sunday, June 21, at his 83-year-old mother’s home, agents of the Iranian government seized Maziar Bahari. As his mother looked on, Mr. Bahari — a 42-year-old Newsweek journalist and documentary filmmaker who has been accredited by the Iranian authorities for over a decade — was arrested and taken to Evin prison, where we believe he is being held in isolation. He has not been allowed to see a lawyer, nor has he been formally charged. He is awaiting the birth of his first child.
Mr. Bahari, a dual Canadian-Iranian citizen, has found himself an unwilling player in a frightened regime’s attempt to explain away the demonstrations that took place after Iran’s contested June 12 presidential elections. The government tries to justify these kinds of arrests by asserting that the Western news media were helping to drive the unrest in hopes of fomenting a “velvet revolution.”
Mr. Bahari’s case might be of limited interest save for one thing: the regime denying him his most basic rights is an aspiring nuclear power. If Iran can so easily become a totalitarian caricature, imprisoning journalists and mostly peaceful protesters, what else is it capable of?
This is more than a rhetorical question. The United States and several partner countries are preparing for talks with Iran. Tehran ultimately wants to continue enriching uranium, and this will only be acceptable if the world can verify that no nuclear material is being diverted to a weapons program. Verification will be difficult, however, if international inspectors could at any moment be accused of spying and taken prisoner.
If Mr. Bahari’s experience is any indication, this could easily happen. His arrest demonstrates that the regime tends to overreact when it feels threatened. Iranian state media have printed a “confession” Mr. Bahari is said to have given at a news conference (which seems never to have been broadcast). In this confession he supposedly described the ways in which the Western news media had helped fuel unrest in Iran.
After an appearance at a show trial on Aug. 1, he was presented at another news conference. There he repeated some of the same things about how the Western news media had supported the West’s plots. He also apologized and asked for a pardon from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Since then, nothing.
As the three-month anniversary of Mr. Bahari’s arrest approaches, the outside world has an unusual opportunity to express its disapproval of Tehran’s human-rights abuses. On Sept. 23, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to speak at the United Nations General Assembly. The Iranian president seems to love to appear before this audience of nations. But it is outrageous that Mr. Ahmadinejad would come before this body even as his government is detaining a citizen of another country for nothing more than the pursuit of work as a journalist.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is likely to be greeted by protesters in New York, and as usual, he will dismiss them. But this year the real protest should take place inside the chamber, with governments condemning the arbitrary and unjustified detention of a foreign journalist. If Iran wants to be taken seriously on the world stage, it needs to adhere to international standards. Journalists need to be free to report within the legal framework of the country. Foreign governments need to be granted consular access to their citizens. Prisoners need to be granted access to their lawyers, and either charged or released quickly.
According to its charter, the United Nations was founded “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” If there is one place on the planet where the spirit of the charter ought to prevail, it should be inside the United Nations chamber.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek.