Iran’s Human Rights Abuses, COP27 Concludes, World Cup Kicks Off, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, the UN Human Rights Council holds a special session on Iran, the COP27 Climate Summit wraps up, and soccer's World Cup in Qatar kicks off. It's November 17th, 2022 in time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

HILL:
And I'm Alice Hill, sitting in for Jim Lindsay.

MCMAHON:
Alice is CFR's David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for energy and the environment. Alice, thanks for joining the podcast.

HILL:
Great to be here. Bob, next week the United Nations Human Rights Council, also known as the UNHRC, will hold a special session on Iran. This is a result of the Iranian government's recent crackdown on protests, threats to journalists and other alleged human rights violation. What results can we expect from this?

MCMAHON:
Well, if the interest in holding the session is any indication, potentially you could have Iran facing special sort of singling out and rebuke for its actions so far and potentially a warning that it needs to take seriously. We should note that Iran has been dismissive of this, and other international calls, and examine its response to the protests. It calls the protests, "riots," by the way, Alice, and that are fomented in great part by outside powers like the United States, like Israel and so forth. But these special sessions do not happen all the time. The UN Human Rights Council has a season in which it meets to hold such a session, you need to have a number of countries voting for it. This session came at the request of Germany and Iceland, their ambassadors to the UN in Geneva, and they were supported by forty-four other states. And so we'll see whether the forty-seven members of the council, which includes countries like China, Venezuela, Cuba, will go along with any sort of a vote condemning Iran.

There is already a UN rapporteur that reports on Iran on a regular basis as well. So Iran has the attention of international monitors on its human rights, but this is a moment to frame it and to isolate the instance of these protests because if we take a quick look at, so far, these have been extraordinary protests. They were triggered by death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian, under a serious suspicion that she was beaten in police custody, which is when she died, and she was detained because she apparently was not wearing her head covering properly, her hijab properly. So the morality police detained her. 

And there have been all sorts of companion protests now, many of them spearheaded by women. You're seeing all over the country, really extraordinary, even with the clamp down and the internet blackout going on in Iran, reports, audio and video are getting out, showing that they are continuing. As well as reports from reputable monitors that there have been attempts to crack down, rather brutally, I believe more than 300 people have been killed, maybe as many as a tenth of them have been children. 

One of the features of these protests have been many cases, 15, 14 year old girls taking part and you'll see footage of them being beaten or shot at and it's a real range of things. Sometimes it's shooting with bullets, sometimes it's tasers, sometimes it's clubs. There's an attempt to instill fear, which is part of the playbook of the Iranian authorities and past protests, and that has worked for them. They are very worried that it's not working for them this time, even though it's been a difficult period for Iranians to speak out. But as we are hearing in report after report, the Iranians feel like this is a tipping point to change some things that have just become untenable after forty-three years of the Islamic regime.

HILL:
So what do you think this UNHRC move would mean for the Iranian government? Do you think it would change their approach or is it just outside noise that they'll blame on the Western world?

MCMAHON:
For the regime that's in power right now, it's the latter. They're part, as I indicated earlier, they're part of a number of countries that are known by human rights observers as a coalition of abusers. They get together and make common cause and try to block any such sessions from happening, and if they don't do that, then at least they block any sort of a formal resolution against them. But having this meeting, having in a public way charges being brought against them, even from countries that Iran dismisses as lacking credibility, it still adds up for those either in the Iranian diaspora in the human rights community or within Iran in themselves who do get these reports to build some solace and know that there is support out there.

The international support has at this point, there's been a lot of attention to the fact that beside the rhetoric, there has been attempts to provide internet services in Iran or what some people call a little bit of a cat and mouse game to set up VPNs for Iranians to log on to internet services that are not tracked or squashed by the government, and so that looks like it's going to continue. But then is there an accounting, is there a sort of a formal record keeping of what the regime is doing in the event that there is a changeover? I'll mention one other thing that has made these protests more significant. We had pretty large protests in 2018, Alice, that were over mainly economic concerns and in 2009 there was a so-called Green Revolution over political concerns and a rigged presidential vote, ultimately tamped down in both cases.

This one, again is continuing for a longer period and it's continuing without any sort of single or singular leadership. There's not a leader, let's say like Alexei Navalny in Russia who authorities can grab and throw in a penal colony and clamp down on and associates and so forth. It's really... it's happening by the grassroots and that is what's alarmed Iranians, and so they've lashed out in many different directions, including against ethnic minorities. Kurds have taken a lot of brunt. They've bombed Kurdish centers in Iraq as well where they see what they fear as Iranian organizing cells there, but you've seen Baloch protestors also singled out. So again, it's a question of what is the staying power of the regime crackdown of the protest themselves and will it resemble ultimately the '79 protests that led to the ouster of the shah and the Islamic Revolution. You're hearing very respected Iranian experts saying, "This is different, hold on and watch what's going on." And I think it's events like this UN session that gives sustenance to the protestors.

HILL:
The media has just reported that there were five death sentences issued for protestors. Do you think that will change the international view of this or be more destabilizing for the Iranian government in the long run? How do you think those death sentences play out?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I mean that's one of the things that does get attention. In addition to whatever reports are cited and eyewitness testimony and so forth at the session, there is a lot of concern about Iranians trumping up charges that will justify death sentences under Iranian law. And so I think again, that's going to be important to single out and to draw attention to. We should note that there were some reports that went out, actually went viral this past week, including an initial one that was, I think forwarded by the Canadian Prime Minister that indicated that there are plans for massive executions and that report ended up being discredited and was removed and the Canadian Prime Minister, I think, removed his reference to it.

But it shows the sense of concern there is that the Iranian regime potentially getting desperate, now this is both the security organs that report to the Supreme leader like Khomeini, but also the hard line presidency of Ebrahim Raisi that they're concerned enough that they want to send this signal that they're going to crack down brutally. Well, Alice, I want to move to the COP27 discussion. This is that annual summit that goes on for quite a bit of time and then it has this sort of, typically a flurry in its wrap up. And I wanted to talk to you as having freshly attended COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt to give us a sense about what the takeaway should be so far. Is there going to be a dramatic wrap up to the summit with some sort of sweeping new global commitment?

HILL:
Well, thanks, Bob. I did attend part of the COP27. This is the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. It's been held, not twenty-seven consecutive years, but almost twenty-seven consecutive years; there was one year off for the pandemic. Representatives from almost two hundred nations show up from around the globe. And the focus is on both stopping harmful greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere causing global warming plus how to adapt, that is prepare, for the impacts of climate change like flooding, drought, extreme heat, wildfires. Many thousands, estimated over 30,000 people, gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh. It's a resort town on the Egyptian Red Sea Coast on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It's a remarkable place. It's very dry there, but the entire resort has seemingly countless pools, water parks, really a focus on the use of water.

The conference typically runs for about two weeks. It's scheduled end date is this Friday at 6:00 PM Egyptian time. But often it runs over when negotiations are getting tense, and it appears that negotiations are in fact getting tense right now. Many world leaders have attended, including President Biden, but some important world leaders took a pass on this one and that includes Modi of India and Xi from China. Of course, those are major emitters and whatever they choose to do will be material to how the world comes out with climate change. 

The issue that's really been dominant at this COP is money, money, money. We see that the Global South and developing nations have said essentially that they have had nothing to do with creating the climate crisis. They are responsible for just a very insignificant amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases that have now covered the globe, but they are already experiencing very severe impacts, and Pakistan is a remarkable example of this.

Pakistan in the early spring had terrible heat waves, so there were deaths. Most of the country is not air conditioned and it becomes so hot that it's dangerous for people to be outside. They got through the extreme heat wave, but then they got slammed with a change in the monsoon rains, just torrents of rainfall that flooded, really, very hard to comprehend this, how much it flooded, but a third of the nation. They lost some 8,000 miles of roadways, 410 bridges, they saw 40 percent of their cotton crop, and they are one of the world's largest producers of cotton, washed away, 15 percent of the rice crop. And now as they're heading into the next planning season, they're concerned that the wheat planning will be affected. And they face hunger, stunting of children, malnutrition. They also have had a public health threat as a result of this. They've seen mosquito born diseases increase, the spread of dengue as well as malaria because of course mosquitoes spread their larvae in the standing water that's left after this flooding.

MCMAHON:
We're talking about one of the world's most populous nations on top of it.

HILL:
Absolutely. And it happens to be one of the nations in the world most vulnerable to climate change. So, at COP, Pakistan took a very strong stand about this issue of money. Very clearly stated, "We have nothing to do, or very little to do with the emissions problem, but we need really substantial help with covering these damages that we're already occurring and suffering from. And then how we prepare." So they had a booth and on the booth they borrowed from our own Las Vegas saying, "What happens in Pakistan will not stay in Pakistan." And that is what's happening now. The developing nations have found their voice for the first time at this COP, 27 COPs before, they've been trying for many decades to get this issue of loss and damage, it's called reparations, but at the bottom line it's about payment to help the developing world deal with climate change. They've gotten this issue of loss and damage onto the agenda at COP 27. 

From the latest reporting Europe and other countries have come forward and said, "Maybe it's time to consider a loss and damage fund that we will increase the financing available." United States so far is becoming a bit of an outlier and holding back. It'll be very interesting to see where this lands and we should know shortly whether the United States moves back. What happened in Glasgow last year? The same set of developing nations insisted on having loss and damage as part of the outcome of that COP26. Didn't happen. It was shunted over to a promise for continuing dialogues over a three year period, the Glasgow Dialogues. Developing nations are fine with those dialogues, but they still are asking, "Where's the money?" And that will be the biggest point of contention.

One of the additional sore points beyond just the lack of money and the fact that nations haven't honored the promises they've made so far, which include that they would give $100 billion annually beginning in 2020. There's also a sore point with the fact that so little of the money is going towards adaptation, that is the preparation for these climate impacts. These poor countries simply don't have the kind of infrastructure that we have to deal with flooding, to deal with extreme heat, they don't have air conditioning as widely across their nations. And the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, that's the group of scientists who report periodically about progress on climate change, found that in recent years, 4 to 8 percent of funding went to adaptation. So that is another call out at this particular COP. "We've got to increase that funding for adaptation," is what the developing nations have said in a concerted way.

MCMAHON:
They get loss and damage on the agenda but doesn't necessarily translate into a meaningful fund yet, as far as we know.

HILL:
It has not translated and it seems doubtful at this point, but perhaps I'll be proven wrong shortly. It's still an open question whether there'll be a loss and damage fund without the United States participating. It will be perceived as a major stumbling block to future progress. The United States, of course is the world's historically largest emitter, as well as the current second largest emitter, well behind China, but still the second largest emitter. And now we have European nations saying essentially that they're okay with the concept of a loss and damage fund, but the United States hanging back. So that will be a particularly contentious issue until it is resolved and I anticipate that it will be a continuing item on the agenda going forward as more COPs take place.

Another challenge in this COP is the lack of ambition. After Glasgow COP, COP26 closed, all nations agreed in the Glasgow Climate Pact that they would come back to this COP27 with renewed ambition about all the emissions they were going to cut. Only twenty-four nations did that and the UN has now issued a report that there's no credible path forward to holding global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius or below pre-industrial temperatures. The 1.5 degree has been a signal to all nations that there's a dangerous level of heating, and that's why it's been included in the Paris Agreement and been renewed at each COP since. In fact, the G20, which was just held this week, the G20 nations also renewed the commitment to 1.5 degrees. That's interesting because the UN, as I said, has determined that we can't reach 1.5 degrees, we'll blow past that.

MCMAHON:
Alice,  Some have pointed to the renewable energy surge as a bright point, and you have even in U.S. legislation, a great deal more attention towards supporting that sector, you have European countries committing to ending carbon emitting vehicles, I believe in the next decade or so and an ongoing production of renewables from major countries like China. So is this an area that could help in slowing some of this emission surge that we're seeing or is it just too little too late?

HILL:
It's a complex picture. Our emissions this past year have jumped by 1 percent, so that's in the negative column. In the positive column is the International Energy Administration has said that in its opinion, the war in the Ukraine has jump started clean energy investments. This past year we did see European countries repowering their coal plants because they were concerned about their own energy security. And then China had a terrible heat wave that lasted over seventy days. It dried up rivers in Sichuan, its major industrial province, to the point that hydropower couldn't be produced. And so as a result of that alarming occurrence, China reinvested and has continued to invest in further coal and natural gas power plants. So we've seen steps forward and steps back.

The challenge is that the scientists in the International Panel on Climate Change, and this is a consensus document, they're executive summaries all scientists that serve on this from one hundred and ninety plus nations that are part of the UN framework agree that we need to cut our emissions by about 45 percent by 2030. That's just seven years from now. That's worldwide. That's a tall order. And that's why there's increased anxiety about the slippage from the goals that have been pronounced by these repeated meetings and coming together of delegates without the progress. In truth, we have continued to heat up and the amount of emissions in the world hit the highest level ever recorded in Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, 421 parts per million this May. That's up substantially and it continues to climb. So it's urgent, but the world has been challenged by geopolitical events as well as climate impacts in its ability to truly get climate change under control.

MCMAHON:
So we'll keep our eyes on the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, I guess in the next twenty-four, forty-eight hours, Alice, for some flurry of activity and renewed purpose because what you've just cited is alarming and it has become distressingly familiar year after year now.

HILL:
Yes, the stakes are high, but it's very difficult for nations to come together and this is the only mechanism we currently have to achieve that. So a lot of pressure on those representatives to come up with a better plan. 

Bob, let's move to the Gulf. On Sunday, the highly anticipated 2022 World Cup will kick off in Doha, Qatar. Now this is the first World Cup held in the Middle East and the Qatari government has made sustainability a key part of the tournament. What else is making these games significant?

MCMAHON:
Well, location is obviously the really big deal here. We're talking about a World Cup in November, December because it's in the Middle East, because it's in a country that in the summer is basically accustomed to extreme heat before the rest of the world knew what extreme heat was. We're along the order of 95 to 112 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime. It's still hot there and so there's going to be all sorts of measures that the organizers have taken to try to keep the playing field cool. Something along the lines of $200 billion has been invested by the Qatari government since 2010, since getting the bid in 2010, to build, in addition to I believe eight stadiums in Qatar, which by the way is a country, it's been compared in size to Jamaica, I think, with the population of Brooklyn, and in that area they've sprouted in a decade or so an incredible amount of infrastructure.

But alongside that has been a huge amount of controversy, because like other Middle Eastern countries, wealthy ones, the labor is from abroad. A lot of it's from South Asia and a lot of it is ill treated and that's been reported repeatedly by human rights groups. There have been estimates of deaths in the hundreds to the thousands in that period since the World Cup construction boom began. Some of which can be, according to human rights groups, can be directly pinned to working in extreme heat and others is a little bit more murky. But there's a great deal of concern about what was the cost, what was the human cost, for being able to stage these games. Not only that, it's a country that has raised concern over its treatment of LGBTQ individuals and women. It is rife with corruption accusations as well. This is something that's not unfamiliar to the World Cup. After all, the previous one was held in Russia, although at much less cost.

And overall, great deal of concern that the sporting body in the interest to line its pockets, shall we say, went ahead and held the event in a country in which it never should have done so. So at the end of the day, after we get past a setting, the world is going to focus on the games. Like always one imagines, they'll be incredible stories that emerge and underdog teams that come out of the thirty-two teams that are competing and we'll get caught up in the storylines and right down to the final games and potentially the final shootouts and talk about whether or not it was worth it all. 

For me, it does raise the question, like the conversation around the Olympics, should there just be maybe a few small venues in which it's agreed these global events will take place? Thereby ending this competition in which there is inevitably accusations of bribery and corruption going on and also abuses of, whether it's environmental abuses or human rights abuses, and maybe just sort of cluster around a few places and saying, "Okay, this year," just like the let's say the British Open and there's four or five different Scottish venues, "Let's hold it this year in St. Andrews," that kind of thing. I don't know whether that's going to become realistic or not. The next one we should note is going to be shared by North American countries in the hosting, which already is going to be more spread out and less impactful on a small place like this one is. 

So you mentioned sustainability also in your intro, you can judge us better than I could, but it just seems like the impact of such an event, it's going to be hard to say that it was a carbon neutral game, shall we say, but you just came from the region, maybe there's a different vibe there.

HILL:
Well, interestingly, I think this is a sore point, Qatar getting the games, and certainly on the media reporting, the international media, lots of stories suggesting that there was modern slavery in terms of some of the workers coming from a variety of countries being, as you said, allegedly ill-treated, abused. The death figures that were cited in the media reports I saw were 6,500 workers and there were pictures of protests to remember those workers, concerns that Qatar is too small a nation to handle this large of event. So lots of discussion about whether this was a wise choice and finger pointing to the decision in 2010 as being suspiciously achieved to the point where it suggested corruption. It remains to be seen how the games will go.

For climate change. I should note that next year the COP28 will occur in Abu Dhabi. So the Middle Eastern countries are definitely asserting their interest in these global events. It was, in my opinion, a struggle to some extent for Egypt to put on this event. There were complaints about the bathrooms, the food, probably that occurs in many countries, but it seemed that there were more surfacing and then there was great concern about the freedom of protestors in a country that is not known for freedom of speech. I did meet a young American protestor who shared with me that she felt that she had been harassed by police with regard to her presence in the country. So there will be more question marks as we go forward and it'll be very informative to see how both of these countries are judged in hindsight about their ability to handle such huge influxes of people in a very compressed timeframe.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And just a few other side notes, those are all good points, Alice, because it's in Qatar, which has all sorts of rules regarding homosexuality, which is illegal, as well as drinking of alcohol, which is not allowed, fans are going to have to drink their beer and other beverages in designated areas and then they should not be heading into stadium's rowdy and obviously inebriated. At least that's the rule. FIFA rules also state that that displays promoting LGBTQ rights are permitted in stadium. So we'll see whether that holds up as well because some people have vowed they are going to raise those issues and raise protests and use the ability as they had at most other soccer stadiums around the world to raise rights and speech issues. So all sorts of sideline intrigue before the action actually happens.

Again, seeing how this is played out in the past, once the games are underway, there will be inevitable interest in sort of following through, "Did you see what the Dutch striker just did? Did you see that shootout involving the US and Wales," and so forth, just to cite a few of the teams that are going to be competing in this. So as a sports fan and a global sports fan, I'm going to be interested as always. It is unfortunate though that this was allowed to happen in which a country of dubious background and dubious laws is allowed to hold an event like this. Again, we'll see if it has any effect on the future. I don't know if sport-washing, a term we're hearing a lot, is going to actually turn out to be net positive for Qatar or not. 

Alice, we've talked ourselves into the audience figure, the week portion of the podcast in which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday @CFR_org's Instagram story. This week the audience selected the figure eight billion, as in world population hits eight billion. So what can you tell me about that house?

HILL:
Well, supposedly, according to demographers on Tuesday, the world population reached eight billion. A baby was born somewhere who was the eighth billion—

MCMAHON:
I don't know how they measure that, but I'll take your word for it. I'll take their word for it.

HILL:
That is a remarkable number. For millennia, the population was under one billion. It didn't reach one billion until 1804 and then it didn't hit two billion until 1927, less than a hundred years ago. But now we have eight billion and that's up from seven billion in 2011. So we're seeing really high rates of population increase. And the world is expected to grow to over ten billion in the next 60 years. This increase is expected to be driven by just a small set of nations, the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Tanzania. It's largely concentrated in the poorest countries and although we have seen rapid growth, it's a testament to achievements in public health and medicine. We've seen improvements in sanitation and disease control, better access to clean drinking water and the development of vaccines and other medical therapies. We've seen all that, but it's allowed the population to grow to heights that have put us frankly a strain on our planet and threatened continued access for people in many parts of the world to fresh water, to sufficient supplies of food, and it will affect, continue to affect, biodiversity and the ability of our ecosystems to support human civilization. 

So as we go forward, it's a number to be watched. It's expected that India will overtake China as the world's most populous country. The growing population really does put a lot of pressure on the environment. It means that there'll be more climate change if we continue to use fossil fuels to power us and for other purposes, we'll see greater deforestation, and those pressures can reach a point that it becomes quite serious for certain areas to thrive. So we will need to continue to be aware and continue to strive to make improvements in our environmental response so that these populations, these new people joining the planet will have a healthy planet that will serve them well during their lives.

MCMAHON:
Reaching that number, Alice, was very interesting in terms of the responses, because some of them weren't what I expected. I did expect to hear further alarms about the stresses on the planet and so forth. But I also heard a number that... responses that were more about not so much the, let's say the tragedy of the commons and more people competing for fewer resources, but more like there's plenty of food to go around, all things being equal, but there's not equality, in fact there's severe inequality and that's what people studying what these population numbers mean should be focusing more on because that greater inequality is what leads to all sorts of other stresses, whether you're talking about the record number of global refugees, for example, and people crowding into certain pockets of the planet and just the unhealthy conditions of what a growing portion of that eight billion. That's really alarming as well.

It is still rather remarkable to reach that number given the number of wars, given the pandemic we just came through and all of the other woes, that population has continued to grow. And one other takeaway that I thought was interesting was that yes, it's growing, but in fact it's going to slow and it's actually going to go in reverse in another 60 or so years as fertility rates continue to drop sort of alarmingly. It's hard to keep these abstract notions in mind, but it is another moment of just taking stock of where we are and what we can do about it.

HILL:
Absolutely. This demographic change will affect the planet, will affect migration and it is a challenge for governments to be able to respond in a way to keep their population safe and secure. And unfortunately, the pressures will be the greatest on those countries with the least resources. So some of those people, when they are facing hunger or lack of shelter or no livelihoods, will undoubtedly migrate, which will increase the global security challenges for all countries, including the United States.

MCMAHON:
As you said with the sign at COP27, what starts here doesn't stay here, I think could be kind of an universal message.

HILL:
We are more interconnected than ever and there are greater pressures than ever. So it's time for governance to step in.

MCMAHON:
That's what we're all about here at CFR, Alice. So we'll help in however we can.

HILL:
And that's our look at the world next week. Here are some other stories to keep an eye on. Malaysia holds a snap general election and the UN marks World's Children's Day.

MCMAHON:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. Please note that the transcript of our conversation is listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week at cfr.org. Also note that opinion expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Senior Podcast Producer Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Madeline Babin for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Comments. The World Next Week will be back on December 1st. Until then, this is Bob McMahon saying so long and have a happy Thanksgiving.

HILL:
Bob, it's just been terrific to join you, and this is Alice Hill saying bye.