Politics & Power Quote by Shirin Ebadi

Embedded in Ebadi's careful phrasing is a lawyer's instinct for what wins a case: not inner conviction, but credible proof to a skeptical audience. She grants the Iranian government's stated intent "peaceful purposes" just long enough to shift the burden to its real deficit: legitimacy. The operative verb isn't "use" but "convince". In global politics, nuclear technology is never just technology; it's a stress test for trust, transparency, and the story a state tells about itself.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, Ebadi is refusing the lazy binary of Iran as either villain or victim. She concedes the possibility of civilian aims while acknowledging the international fear that enrichment can slide, quickly, into weapons capability. On the other hand, she is indicting the Iranian state for the habits that make persuasion impossible: secrecy, brittle messaging, and a domestic politics that treats accountability as a threat. "International public opinion" is a pointed choice. She doesn't say Washington, the IAEA, or "the West". She widens the jury, implying that Iran's nuclear narrative fails not only because of geopolitics, but because it hasn't met basic standards of openness that any modern public can recognize.

Context matters: Ebadi is a human-rights lawyer and Nobel laureate who has spent her career arguing that sovereignty doesn't erase responsibility. Here, nuclear policy becomes a proxy for governance itself. If the state can't convincingly demonstrate peaceful intent on its most scrutinized program, why should anyone believe its promises anywhere else?