Politics & Power Quote by Shirin Ebadi

"Job security" is a deliberately chilly phrase for something hotter: fear. Ebadi, a lawyer who has lived the mechanics of state pressure, frames repression in the language of workplace stability to expose how authoritarianism often works best when it doesn’t look like outright violence. The point isn’t that attorneys have become timid by temperament; it’s that the system has been redesigned so courage carries a payroll penalty.

The intent is surgical. By focusing on lawyers rather than dissidents, Ebadi spotlights the regime’s real target: the infrastructure that makes rights actionable. Political defendants can still speak, protest, even martyr themselves. What threatens power is a competent advocate who knows procedure, forces evidence into the light, and turns private abuse into public record. Undermine the defender and you don’t need to win arguments; you just remove the conditions under which an argument can happen.

The subtext is an indictment of quiet coercion: disbarment, harassment, license threats, family intimidation, surveillance, the soft blacklisting that makes a career feel provisional. When law becomes a liability, self-censorship follows, and the courtroom becomes a theater with the verdict written backstage.

Context matters because Ebadi isn’t theorizing. As a prominent human rights lawyer from Iran and a Nobel laureate, she’s describing a calibrated strategy used across many states: punish high-profile defense work, then watch the profession internalize the lesson. The tragedy isn’t only fewer brave lawyers. It’s a public trained to accept that political cases shouldn’t have real defense at all.