Shirin Ebadi- Iranian Nobel Peace Prize calls for Regime Change

This activist says Iranians want to eliminate the position of supreme leader. The West can help.
Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer, has had enough. For years she represented her country’s dissidents in the Islamic Republic’s corrupt courts. She spoke out for the rights of women, minorities and students abroad. But she never called for the end of the regime she was fighting to reform. Until now.

“Reform is useless in Iran,” Ebadi told me in an interview Thursday. “The Iranian people are very dissatisfied with their current government. They have reached the point and realized this system is not reformable.”

For Ebadi the means of ending Iranian tyranny should be a U.N.-monitored referendum on the constitution that proposes a basic change: the elimination of the unelected office of supreme leader.