Justice & Law Quote by Abbas Araghchi

“Let me be clear” is the diplomat’s version of a siren: it frames what follows as urgent, non-negotiable, and meant for multiple audiences at once. Abbas Araghchi isn’t just calling for action; he’s staking a claim on the moral language that typically belongs to Western-led institutions. By invoking “costly systems and mechanisms”, he foregrounds the bureaucratic-industrial scale of the postwar human-rights architecture - treaties, courts, UN bodies, investigative mandates - and needles it with an implicit accusation: if these structures are so expensive, so permanent, so proudly advertised, what good are they when a crisis becomes politically inconvenient?

The line’s real work is in the conditional: “if there is any use”. That’s not uncertainty; it’s a challenge. It suggests that the system’s credibility is on trial, and that failure to act now would reveal the whole enterprise as ornamental, selective, or captured by power politics. “Preserve human rights and dignity” is deliberately broad, a moral umbrella wide enough to pressure actors who might dodge narrower legal claims. It also signals a familiar diplomatic gambit: move the argument from contested facts to universally marketable values, then dare opponents to look hypocritical.

Contextually, Araghchi speaks from a world where “rules-based order” rhetoric competes with televised suffering and veto-proof impunity. The phrase “now is the time” compresses decades of institutional promise into a single moment of reckoning: either the machinery proves it can protect the vulnerable, or it confirms what critics have long suspected - that it mainly protects the legitimacy of those who control it.