The Legal Architecture of Repression: Constitutional Design, Human Rights and International Accountability in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Law promises to constrain power; in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it has been engineered to entrench it. This dissertation comprises three essays that examine how legal systems—domestic and international alike—can simultaneously promise protection and enable impunity. Approaching this paradox from three distinct vantage points—digital rights, international criminal accountability, and constitutional design—the essays together advance a single claim: the gap between law's promise and law's performance in Iran is not a failure of enforcement but a feature of legal architecture itself, systematically exploited to entrench autocratic power, silence dissent, and evade accountability.

The first essay, International Law and the Right to Global Internet Access: Exploring Internet Access as a Human Right Through the Lens of Iran's Women-Life-Freedom Movement, examines the Iranian regime's use of internet censorship, throttling, and shutdown as instruments of political repression, focusing on the state's response to the protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. It argues that the internet has become so integral to the exercise of fundamental rights—expression and assembly, development, access to information, and non-discrimination—that deliberate state interference with connectivity now constitutes a distinct and cognizable human rights violation. Drawing on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet, and successive United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions, the essay maps the doctrinal foundations for recognizing internet access as a human right while exposing the structural weaknesses—chiefly the derogation regime of ICCPR Article 4 and the national security exception of Article 19(3)—that autocracies invoke to lend censorship a veneer of legality. It further contends that shutdowns deployed to facilitate mass violence against civilians, as in Iran in November 2019 and again during the Women-Life-Freedom Movement, may satisfy the elements of a crime against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute—and that litigating such a case before the International Criminal Court could establish the precedent needed to deter future shutdowns.

The second essay, Prosecuting Crimes Against Humanity in Iran: Pathways for Justice and Legal Accountability, confronts the gravest consequence of the unchecked power the first essay exposes: the systematic use of political execution as an instrument of state terror. It opens with the story of Farkhondeh Monemi—executed at the age of twenty in Bandar Abbas prison in 1982, and the author's maternal aunt—and situates Iran's post-revolutionary execution practices within a legal and historical analysis demonstrating that the regime's conduct satisfies every definitional element of crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute: widespread and systematic, directed against a civilian population, carried out pursuant to explicit state policy, and undertaken with knowledge at the highest levels of government. The essay shows how the deliberately vague offenses of Moharebeh and Efsad-e fil-Arz in the Islamic Penal Code have functioned not as criminal law but as instruments of persecution, clothing political violence in the language of legality. It then confronts the central obstacle: even where the substantive case is overwhelming, the jurisdictional architecture of international criminal law erects near-insurmountable barriers to achieving justice. Iran is not a party to the Rome Statute; a Security Council referral is foreclosed by Russia's veto; and immunity doctrines shield the most culpable officials. The conviction of Hamid Nouri in Sweden—upheld on appeal in December 2023—proves that universal jurisdiction can work, yet his release in a June 2024 prisoner exchange illustrates its fragility. The essay proposes targeted reforms to close these impunity gaps, including limiting immunity for those accused of systematic crimes against humanity, harmonizing universal jurisdiction across domestic legal systems, and expanding the ICC's referral mechanisms.

The third essay, An Illusory Republic: Deconstructing Iran's Constitutional Double-Speak, turns from the international order to the domestic constitutional foundations that make such abuses possible. It examines the founding paradox of the post-revolutionary state: a broad coalition united in 1979 around popular sovereignty produced a constitution that formally embedded republican forms—elections, separation of powers, institutional oversight—while concealing mechanisms designed to hollow them out. Through a detailed analysis of the Assembly of Experts and the Council of Guardians, the essay shows how institutions nominally created as checks were constructed to concentrate authority in the Supreme Leader: the Council of Guardians vets every candidate for elected office yet is itself appointed, directly and indirectly, by the Leader, while the Assembly of Experts is charged with supervising and even removing the Leader, yet its membership is filtered through that same Council. The 1989 amendments completed the circle—abolishing the requirement that the Leader be a recognized religious authority (marjaʿ), eliminating collective leadership, and dramatically expanding the office's formal powers—transforming a structurally flawed but nominally plural system into one in which republican language became constitutional facade. The essay concludes that Iran's Constitution does not constrain autocracy; it legitimizes it.

Read together, the essays advance a sustained argument about legal form and political power. International human rights law offers the appearance of protection while supplying the derogation clauses and security exceptions that autocracies need; international criminal law offers the appearance of accountability while erecting the jurisdictional barriers that shield the most responsible; and Iran's Constitution offers the appearance of republican governance while concentrating power in a single unaccountable individual. In each domain, the distance between promise and performance is structural, not incidental. Closing it requires more than better enforcement—it requires recognizing that legal architecture itself can serve as an instrument of domination. This dissertation is offered as a contribution to that recognition, and to the reforms it demands.