Politics & Power Quote by Shirin Ebadi

In a few brisk lines, Shirin Ebadi draws a bright boundary between advocacy and complicity, then widens it into an indictment of the state. The first sentence is a lawyerly principle dressed as a moral emergency: if representing someone becomes prosecutable, defense collapses into self-defense. Ebadi isn’t pleading for special treatment; she’s naming the tactic that authoritarian systems love because it’s efficient. You don’t have to outlaw dissent if you can criminalize the infrastructure that makes dissent legible in court.

The subtext is about contagion. “Same crimes as their clients” describes a legal sleight of hand: guilt by proximity. It turns the attorney-client relationship into evidence, making counsel itself look like conspiracy. That chills not just a single case but an entire profession, prompting the quiet withdrawal that regimes prefer over noisy censorship.

Her second sentence sharpens from professional ethics to universal standards. “Political charges” is doing heavy lifting: it signals prosecutions where the outcome is prewritten, the laws elastic, the courtroom a stage prop. Ebadi’s claim that such trials aren’t “in accordance with human rights” isn’t abstract idealism; it’s a strategic reframing that denies these proceedings the legitimacy governments crave. She’s effectively saying: calling it a trial doesn’t make it justice.

Context matters: Ebadi, an Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human rights lawyer, speaks from a world where attorneys and activists can be detained, disbarred, surveilled. The intent is protective and confrontational at once: defend the right to counsel, expose political prosecution as rights-violations, and warn that when a state punishes the defense, it’s admitting it can’t win on evidence.