The first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize sent a bold anti-war message to the West in her award speech today, accusing Washington of using the September 11th attacks as an excuse to violate human rights.
Iran's Ms Shirin Ebadi also slammed the US administration for double standards in ignoring UN resolutions in the Middle East, while using them as a pretext to go to war in Iraq, in her acceptance speech at the ceremony in Oslo.
Shirin Ebadi
"In the past two years, some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of September 11th and the war on international terrorism as a pretext," said Ms Ebadi, a reformist lawyer.
"Regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms...have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of the war on terrorism," she said.
Ms Ebadi (56) who won the $1.4 million prize for her work for the rights of women and children in Iran, also lashed out at what she called breaches of the Geneva conventions at the US Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba.
She said Guantanamo prisoners had been "without the benefit of the rights stipulated under the international Geneva conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the (UN) International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights".
Ms Ebadi, Iran's first female judge before the 1979 Islamic revolution forced her to step aside in favour of men, said it was worrying that human rights were violated by the same Western democracies that had initiated the principles.
The laureate said that she, like many other human rights activists in the world, questioned why some United Nations resolutions were binding to the West and others were ignored.
"Why is it that in the past 35 years, dozens of UN resolutions concerning the occupation of the Palestinian territories by the state of Israel have not been implemented promptly?" Ms Ebadi said.
"Yet, in the past 12 years, the state and people of Iraq, once on the recommendation of the Security Council, and the second time in spite of UN Security Council opposition, were subjected to attack, military assault, economic sanctions, and ultimately, military occupation?"