 Thank you, Lisa, for your kind introduction and to the Association for Baha'i Studies for this kind invitation. I'm going to begin with the story of a four-year-old child who is busy drawing a picture and his adoring mother, admiring her son's artwork, asks him, what are you drawing, my dear? Without disrupting his drawing, he says, mother, I am drawing God. And the mother lovingly looks at him and says, but nobody knows what God looks like. The child stops, looks at his mother, well, when I'm finished with my drawing, everybody will know exactly what he looks like. So why do I begin with this story? Because I want to speak about divine images. And in order to achieve a better future in this place of darkness, we must first have an image of what it is that we want the future to be. So from this image of the four-year-old child drawing this picture, I will now show you another divine image. And that image also is of a four-year-old child. Four-year-old child is by the name of Artin Rahimian. This photograph was taken just over a month ago outside of Tehran on July the 15th. And Artin's mother, a Farah Hesami, is not there to admire the many drawings that I'm sure he makes as a four-year-old child would. Because Farah Hesami is in prison in Rejai Shah outside of Tehran because of her collaboration with the Bahá'í Institute of Higher Education, the underground university created because Bahá'ís have no right of university education in Iran. And the man in the photograph is not the father of Artin Kamran Rahimian because he also is in Rejai Shah prison where he has been for the past two years. But also for the crime, if you like, of having collaborated with this underground university. Rather, the man in the photograph is a Mohammed Nourizad. And those of you that know something about this man will know why this is a divine image. Mohammed Nourizad was once upon a time, I will cue you for the change in the photo. If you could go back to the previous photo please. There we go. So Mohammed Nourizad was once upon a time one of the staunchest supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, of the Islamic Revolution. He was a filmmaker and a journalist in Kehon newspaper, which is the mouthpiece of the Islamic Republic where much of the hate propaganda and incitement against the Bahá'ís comes from. So to see the image of the same man who has now become a dissident and an opponent of the regime, kissing the feet of a four-year-old Bahá'í child whose parents are in prison is truly a divine image. And one which many of us would have never imagined possible a few years ago. And this is what Nourizad wrote about his visit to Arteen's home, Arteen who is now with his elderly grandmother because both of his parents are in prison and sadly he's not the only Bahá'í child that suffers under these circumstances. Mr. Nourizad wrote, I told Arteen, my little boy, I apologize, I apologize to you on behalf of all those who in these Islamic years have made you and the Bahá'í followers face injustice. This is a remarkable moment of contrition, a remarkable moment of forgiveness, a glimpse of the future of reconciliation and togetherness that Iranians are struggling for. What is equally remarkable is the response three days later on July 18 of Arteen's father, Kamran Rahimyan, who wrote a response which was ferried out of Rajay Shah prison and widely published. He writes, Mr. Nourizad, my name is Kamran Rahimyan. I am the father of Arteen, the four-year-old you saw when you went to our home. You visited our shrunken household. And the three people who though each member of one family now form a family between them. My mother, whose husband was taken from her by execution and who bears the weight of all the suffering of these past years on her shoulders. Her grandchild, 13-year-old Gina, who once had to experience the simultaneous arrest of both her mother and father in 2004. Now Gina's father is in prison and her mother is in the heavens. My mother's other grandchild is Arteen, who has both of his parents in prison. What you wrote made me feel the need to make myself heard. And gave me the opportunity to express myself. I give you my thanks along with a tremendous amount of both approval and sorrow. It seems to me that you have knowingly exposed yourself to suffering in order to listen to my family's pain. Mr. Nourizad, in the words you wrote, I heard you ask for forgiveness, which I took as a desire for acceptance and understanding. You kissed Arteen's feet, which I took as a symbol of respect and love. You acknowledged that many people were missed in that house, which I took as your inclination to accept responsibility. I heard your hope for support and justice for Arteen's parents. Mr. Nourizad, standing before Arteen, you knelt and kissed his feet. I found this to be an utmost expression of love and respect, not to Arteen, but to the pure human spirit. At the same time, I wish that no person be forced to kneel before another person out of shame. If I could now ask for the photo of Mr. Kamran Rahimyan, Farah Hisami, and young Arteen before his parents were sent to prison. So the image we have is one of a new beginning. A new beginning where after 35 years of violence, after 160 years of hatred and scapegoating, the people of Iran are awakening. And one can only attribute this awakening to the long-suffering and steadfastness of those that against overwhelming odds suffered the unspeakable and never once swerved from their faith. Today I'd like to speak to you about how one can reconcile forgiveness and reconciliation with the need for justice. We are told on the one hand to instantly forgive those that have wronged against us, but we're also told that we must have institutions that uphold justice. How is it possible to create out of these terrible circumstances in Iran a new culture, a culture of human rights, a culture of the rule of law, a culture which shuns violence and in which all human beings have their dignity recognized by the law? Some time ago, after the events of 2009, that you will recall was the beginning of the popular uprisings in the Middle East, the so-called Green Movement in Iran in 2009, I was speaking at an event and after the event a mother came to me. And the mother said, I have lost my child. Now, if one thinks about those words, I have lost my child, one could imagine a mother in a shopping mall somewhere here in Orange County who has lost her child. She wants to go and find him by referring her child to the, I don't know, information making an announcement, but this mother had truly lost her child. She had picked up his body from a morgue in Tehran after he was tortured to death because he had dared go out into the streets and cry for freedom. So the mother looked at me and said, well, you're the professor of law, you're the war crimes prosecutor, certainly you can do justice for my son. And that was a very humbling moment where all these years of learning and accomplishment and status found themselves empty and wanting because I had to tell that mother that there is no court, there is no tribunal given the current state of international law given the fact that Iran does not recognize the jurisdiction of the international criminal court, that there was no forum where she could bring her grievance. The idea was born at that moment of creating a people's tribunal. Now this is an interesting phenomena because we have this idea of courts as formal institutions. There is a defendant in the dock, there is a prosecution, there is a panel of judges that make a ruling and then the accused, if convicted, is taken to a prison. So that's the image that we have of justice. But how do you achieve justice against the backdrop of thousands and thousands of executions and victims of torture? Hannah Arendt famously wrote after the Nuremberg judgment convicted the Nazi leaders, many of whom were sentenced to death, but the crimes of the Nazis explode the limits of the law. For these crimes, no punishment can be sufficient. So how can one begin to achieve justice under these circumstances? And in particular, let's consider the first 10 years of the Islamic Revolution by conservative estimates some 15 to 20,000 people were executed in that first decade, including the extermination of the Baha'i leadership. By other estimates, including that of Professor Ervand Abrahamyan in his book, Iran Between Two Revolutions, that number could be as high as 40 to 50,000. Now these are all statistics, they're numbers 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, 50,000. But we forget that behind every statistic, behind every number, is a person with a name, with a father, with a mother, a brother, a sister, a schoolmate, a workmate, a whole universe of human relations and emotions. And for every one person whose life was extinguished in prison, for every person that became broken forever as a result of torture or a person who spent many years of his life in prison, the violence is not simply directed against that person, but it is directed at this circle of social and family relations. So if one considers the scale of these atrocities, one begins to see that there is a nation, an entire nation that has been deeply traumatized, a nation that has been saturated in hatred and violence. And one sees perhaps as a therapist would someone who is suffering from trauma, the need for collective healing. We need to put this entire nation on the therapist's couch and begin to heal these deep wounds in order to ensure that the change that we bring about isn't simply substituting one set of tyrants with an even worse set of tyrants as happened 35 years ago. But that we are genuinely transforming social values and creating a new culture. In this context, the purpose of justice isn't simply to punish this or that person and put them in prison, but to bring about a profound transformation of values. Digressing momentarily to speak a bit about the notion of habitual lawfulness, which is a sociological description of what legal systems are all about. Legal systems are not so much about courts and judges and prisons as they are about the internalized habitual social values which make crime as a sociologist would call a form of deviance, a deviance from a norm of habitual lawfulness. Now, speaking of lawlessness, I live in Italy at the moment and we have a city in the south, Napoli, you know it as Naples, and some time ago a man went to rob a bank with his motorcycle. He got off his motorcycle, put on his ski mask with his gun. He came out with a bag full of money and noticed that his motorcycle had been stolen. So that will give you a glimpse of the notion of habitual lawfulness. You can imagine this man saying, what kind of countries is that a bank robber cannot do his job properly? But when we look at the culture of violence that you have in Iran, imagine what it's like for an 80-year-old child to stand in a square and see a public hanging. What does that do to the psyche of that child? What must we do to that society to allow it to heal and to internalize these moral and spiritual values which we speak about? Well, one aspect of that is telling the truth, exposing the people to historical truth because an essential ingredient of tyranny is hatred, is deception, and we know very well the great lanes to which this regime has gone in order to portray the Baha'is as the source of all sorts of evil conspiracies. So exposing the people to the truth itself is essential to transforming those values. But it's not just exposing people to the truth in terms of a set of objective historical facts. But one must humanize those facts. One must give people an intimate glimpse of what human dignity means. So we decided that we should create a people's tribunal, a truth commission in exile, which really is unprecedented. We know about truth commissions in South Africa, under President Nelson Mandela, a Bishop Tutu became the head of a truth commission, which was part of the process of healing and reconciliation in that country. We've had truth commissions in Argentina dealing with the disappearances under the military junta. We've had the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia, and one could give many examples of societies that are trying to deal with a violent past in order to create a better future. And the point here is really not vengeance. It's not dwelling on the past, but it is reckoning with the past. It's assuming ownership so that these crimes are never again repeated in the future. Naturally, Iran is not yet in a situation where one can have, let's say, a South African-type truth commission which would travel throughout the country and hear the story of the victims. But fortunately, through modern technology, through satellite television, through the Internet, we were able to ensure that many millions of people in Iran witnessed these proceedings. So the thousands of survivors and the family members of the victims in a remarkable form of grassroots justice collected funds and we put together a tribunal. The tribunal had all the trappings of a court except formal status. The judges included as the Chief Justice, and I will show you momentarily some clips, so you have some images of this tribunal. The Chief Judge was Justice Kriegler, who was the South African judge appointed by Nelson Mandela as the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa after the end of apartheid. Himself a remarkable man, a white Afrikaner who once upon a time was very wedded to the racial ideology of the South African state, who then in an expression of contrition turned his back and fought for multiracial democracy. We had judges from Kenya, eminent judge from the United Kingdom, and on the prosecution side, I was joined together with Sir Jeffrey Nice, a very eminent English barrister, who you will also see in one of the clips I will show you, and we issued a letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran inviting them to defend themselves, and of course they declined, which was a very big surprise, and then we proceeded as you would with a default judgment. We had 100 witnesses representing a broad cross-section of the victim population, focusing on the executions of the 1980s, and these victims one by one told harrowing unbelievable stories in their own voice, and their stories were broadcast by satellite, television, and by internet to what we estimate would be at least 20 to 25 million people in Iran who are told that the first decade of the Islamic Revolution was a glorious and golden decade, who know nothing of the horrors that were visited under fellow citizens in these prisons. As a Baha'i who was asked to lead this process, of course I did not want to appear opportunistic in terms of inviting Baha'i witnesses, but many of the families of the political prisoners insisted that there be a Baha'i witness as well, and as you will see in one of the clips, Miss Ruhi Jahanpur that many of you know was the sole survivor of the execution of the Baha'is of Shiraz in 1983, testified, and the story of the persecution of the Baha'is was also broadcast to millions of people in Iran, and what's important is that the persecution of the Baha'is was not somehow isolated from the wider injustices that all Iranians face, and we see from the letter that the Universal House of Justice wrote a remarkable and unprecedentedly audacious letter in 23 June of 2009 after the uprisings in Iran. The House of Justice wrote, you cannot remain aloof and insensitive to the suffering of your people. Clearly this is a sign that the House of Justice now wants us to join hands with the Iranian people as they try to build a better future, and the fact that the persecution of the Baha'is was now seen not as a Baha'i problem, but as an Iranian problem, I think, is highly significant. People are waking up to the fact, including Mr. Nourizad, that hatred and violence is not just an injustice to the victim, to the recipient of that violence, but also to the perpetrator. So what we are dealing with in exposing these truths and trying to achieve some measure of justice is not merely to reclaim the humanity of the victim, but strangely enough also to reclaim the humanity of the torturer, the humanity of the hate monger. And therein lies an understanding of what oneness means and how justice relates to the oneness of mankind, to understanding our inherent nobility. That brings me back to the image of Mr. Nourizad and another remarkable image when Ruhi Jahanpour, testifying before this court, showed the photograph of the 10 young Baha'is that were executed in Shiraz in the summer of 1983. And after her testimony was finished, I noticed that a man had gone and weeping was kissing Ruhi's hand and begging for forgiveness. And when I approached, I heard the man say that he used to be once upon a time a member of the Hojjatiya Society, an anti-Baha'i society whose job was to incite hatred and violence against Baha'is. And at the moment of contrition, he was expressing the profound remorse that he had at what he had done to the Baha'is. So these are all glimpses, glimpses of a future which many of us just a few years ago would have thought unimaginable. Now, the previous speaker, Mrs. Valhadi, in her excellent presentation spoke about the reconceptualization of power. What is the power of a mother who has lost her child, getting back to the woman that first inspired me to explore this different conception of justice? Now, we think of power in terms of financial power, in terms of weapons, propaganda, torture chambers but that really is a want of power. If a man beats his wife and children, is he powerful? On the contrary, he is impotent and he has to compensate for his impotence by visiting violence on those that are weak and vulnerable. If a government needs to brainwash and torture its citizens, it also does so for want of power, for its desperation, for its want of legitimacy. So what is the power of telling the truth? And consider here that those that were the driving force behind this tribunal were a group called the Mothers of Khavaran. Khavaran, many of you will know, is a mass grave outside of Tehran where the 1980s, thousands of bodies were dumped in unmarked graves because the regime would not even admit that these thousands of people were executed. Part of the crime was the denial of the crime, visiting violence on people and not even admitting the truth. So in Khavaran also, many Baha'is were buried and many of the Mothers of Khavaran would go to this mass grave to mourn their children. How do you mourn a child when you don't know where he or she is buried? So the Mothers, many of whom did not know each other, would simply see each other there. They would lay flowers, they would like candles, some of them would say prayers and the militia would come and they would beat the Mothers and very often they would imprison them merely for mourning their children. And of course a mother who has lost her child has nothing to lose. What does she have to fear? So the Mothers would come right back and they still do every year on the anniversary of these executions. So what is the power of a mother who comes before this tribe, you know, before 20 million viewers in Iran and she holds the photograph of her four children and explains how one by one they were arrested and executed. There was a remarkable scene where this mother was telling her story and there were two phases of the tribunal, one in London, the other in the Hague and the London portion was held in the Amnesty International offices in London and the portion in the Hague remarkably we managed to rent the Hague Academy which is right beside the Peace Palace, the seat of the International Court to make this as close to an official tribunal as we could. And this mother, as she was telling her story, had tears streaming from her eyes and I looked in the room, in the room there were communists, there were monarchists, there were republicans, there were Islamic reformists, there were Kurds and Baha'is and atheists and really a cross-section of Iran. And at that moment, which was both very painful but also very beautiful, everyone in that room was crying with that mother. It was a moment of transcendent shared humanity. No one asked, is your child a communist, a monarchist, a Baha'i? It really didn't matter. It was just the pain of a mother who had lost her four children and it was an intimate glimpse of what human rights means, not as some intellectual abstraction of some law professor standing in a conference but through the voice of a mother in a way that made it impossible, impossible for the regime to turn around and say that mother is a Zionist, is an American imperialist and all the usual nonsense. So what is the power of the voice of that mother after 30 years of official denial? In a remarkable article in a government website called Bosthab, the regime propagandists admitted for the first time that in the 1980s and in particular in 1988 when 5,000 people were executed within the span of a few days that indeed these mass executions had occurred, they had occurred based on a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But what is remarkable is that the regime saw the need to portray Ayatollah Khomeini, the current supreme leader, as someone who tried to save as many political prisoners as he could. So all of a sudden Ayatollah Khomeini becomes the human rights champion. Who should be awarded Amnesty International's annual prize because he tried to save those political prisoners. Of course the reason for that is because the regime feels the heat. It realizes that it can no longer deny the truth. It realizes that it is becoming answerable to the people and that people will not forget these crimes even if they transpired so many years ago. So just to end on this discussion, we had all the trappings of a court. We had a legitimate process, legal argument, evidence, 100 witnesses, a panel of independent eminent judges. All that we were lacking was formal status. All that we were lacking was a defendant in the dock. But somehow that didn't matter so much when one saw the outpouring of grief, the collective therapy and healing in effect that a nation needs to undergo. And of course this is only the first step in what will have to be a much more widespread process in the coming years. Now some people make lawyer jokes, especially in this country. And I'm living in Italy now and I know the Godfather. You say the Godfather makes an offer that you can't refuse. Well Godfather's lawyer makes an offer you can't understand. So I'm now going to, in the few minutes that remain, just show you some glimpses of this tribunal so that you have some appreciation really of the tremendous power of this really kind of experiment. And then I think I will conclude there. So if Peter and Jeffrey could show the first clip, and I will explain what these clips are, the first one is the testimony of a woman by the name of Esmat Vatan Paras from Shiraaz. She's not a Bahá'í and you will see that she lost virtually her whole family. And I invite you in this clip, which is quite painful to see how this woman, one of the mothers of Chávarán, heals as a, visibly heals as a result simply of having that opportunity to unburden herself from this pain. So we'll begin with just a short clip, which is an introduction to the Iran Tribunal and then the testimony of Mrs. Vatan Paras. So we just fast forward to the testimony of Mrs. Vatan Paras but many of the people would come and they would have t-shirts with the photograph of their loved ones or they would have photographs that they would put on the table and you saw that outside the room there was a table where people had all sorts of objects that were memories of their loved ones, children's clothing, drawings. So it was quite a remarkable place to be. And many of these people really did not know each other and this was an opportunity for them to create a community and to bereave together. So I think we're just trying to fast forward to the clip of Mrs. Vatan Paras now. So there you hear it not from my words but from the words of Mrs. Vatan Paras, who's one among thousands of mothers who has had to suffer really the insufferable and it is remarkable to see the transformation of someone who after years of having this eating away at them every day has an opportunity for a sort of catharsis and imagine how this process will have to be expanded in a future democratic Iran where this process which has been initiated if you like can be repatriated. The next clip is of Ruhi Jahanpur. Unfortunately there's no English subtitles. I've chosen the part of her testimony where she answers questions to the judges in English and you may find it a bit difficult to hear the English or the Persian but I thought I would just share with you just three, four minutes of her testimony. And as I said, this was her testimony about what befell the Baha'is of Shiraz in 1983 including Mona Mahmoud Najad and it was remarkable to see how capably Ruhi spoke about this incredibly painful experience with remarkable dignity and serenity and how touched people were not to hear about some abstract discussion of Baha'is or persecuted but through the story of a husband and wife who said goodbye to each other for the last time and the impact which that has had on a public consciousness in Iran. So if we could now start with Ruhi Jahanpur's testimony. I apologize if you couldn't really hear what she was saying. I couldn't find anything with the English subtitles but just in case you didn't hear Ruhi of course gave very moving testimony of what happened in the prisons in Shiraz but she explained that when she was brought before one of the Islamic magistrates he had said that one of the people had said why don't you just kill us all if you want to get rid of the Baha'is and he had said no we need to kill you one by one because if we kill you all at once the world will, there would be an outcry there would be an outcry in the world and she was explaining how important it was for the world to shine a light on the persecutions and how much worse it would have been if the world had not spoken out and when she was saying this of course the fact that she was the sole survivor made what she was saying that much more powerful and her sense of responsibility as the lone survivor of that incident to tell the story of these people now very quickly just to end we're going to see a little clip of Sir Jeffrey Nice, a very prominent British barrister Queens Council who was my colleague at the UN Tribune on the Hague he was the famous prosecutor of the Milosevic case who kindly agreed to come and it's wonderful to see an English barrister move to tears, it doesn't happen often so let's see just a short glimpse of Sir Jeffrey that is Sir Jeffrey, one of the very eminent English barristers in the summation of the case in the final two minutes there is a glimpse of when the judges came to deliver the judgment and you will see a little clip of Justice Kriegler who as I explained was the Chief Justice of the South African Constitutional Court appointed by Nelson Mandela and after that we will see a small clip of the effect which the delivery of that judgment had on the families of the victims and survivors so that is Justice Kriegler of South Africa and that just gives you a sense about the credibility of the process that there were judges who would not lightly write a judgment without sufficient evidence without proper argumentation the final clip is just a final glimpse of the relief of the families that this judgment had been rendered and finally that their voices had been heard we could have the last clip okay so I'm very sorry I've gone a bit over the time but I hope that this has given you some glimpse if you like of what the future may hold in store that maybe one day we're going back to the four-year-old child perhaps Artin drawing an image of what the future may look when his parents are released from Rajay Shah prison and the family reunited of a day when there will be a truth and reconciliation commission that will travel throughout the cities of Iran where thousands of people can unburden themselves of these wounds that they have held for so long where torture victims and former torturers can embrace in a culture of forgiveness and justice when people will finally be exposed to the historical truth and understand that human dignity is the only basis for building a better future I will just end by reading briefly from the message of the House of Justice once again that was written on 23 June 2009 where they say to the Baha'is of Iran keep alive in your hearts the feeling of confidence that the future of Iran holds bright promise the certitude that the light of knowledge will inevitably dispel the clouds of ignorance the conviction that concern for justice will protect the nation from falling prey to calamity and the belief that love will ultimately conquer hatred and enmity you have demonstrated in the example of your lives that the proper response to oppression is neither to succumb in resignation nor to take on the characteristics of the oppressor the victim of oppression can transcend it through an inner strain that shields the soul from bitterness and hatred and which sustains consistent principled action may the words of Abdul Baha'a resound Iran shall become a focal center of divine splendors her dark-sum soil will become luminous and her land will shine resplendent so let us imagine a day when the president of Iran is a woman who today is a political prisoner and torture victim let us imagine this woman going with a bundle of flowers to the mass grave site in Khabaran and begging the mothers for forgiveness let us imagine a day when Evin prison where thousands have been tortured will become Evin museum and school children will go and read the story of the victims let us imagine a day when we can go to pilgrimage to the reconstructed house of the Bob in Shiraz and where the Association for Baha'i Studies can hold its annual meeting in Tehran Thank you so much