Shirin Ebadi

A great, short speech that opened me up to the Iran perspective. Very experience-based point of view from Shirin Ebadi—I loved her notion that you can judge the human rights record of a culture by the way they treat women. Although simply stated, she built a complex argument around this concept by tracing the origins and functions of a woman being worth 50% of a man in current Iranian law (2 female eyewitnesses to stand against 1 male, damages paid in civil cases are calculated at 50% for women, etc.). But this was not a speech about the shortcomings of Iranian political culture—it was an analysis of geo-politics in the Iran/Iraq region and within the US and Europe. She said more in 30 minutes than most people can say in 90.