Over the past year, the Obama Administration has missed successive opportunities to bring real international pressure on the Iranian government to address the severe human rights crisis gripping the country. Instead, it has focused its political muscle on the singular objective of convincing Iran’s leadership to stop nuclear enrichment. The result has been an almost cruel disregard for the plight of the Iranian people and their urgent need for international attention to their human rights situation.

…The idea of including human rights as an additional issue on the P5+1 agenda was also rejected for fear of compromising the negotiations. The lack of a strong international response served as a green light to Iran’s leaders that there would be no serious consequences for more brutality against its population.

…Iran executes more people per capita than any country in the world — a number which has increased four-fold under Ahmadinejad. Iran leads the world in jailing journalists, and leads Saudi Arabia by a wide margin as one of two countries left in the world that still executes juvenile offenders. Persecution of religious minorities and women’s rights activists have worsened so significantly that punishments include virtual life imprisonment and possible death sentences, and inhumane punishments such as stoning, flogging, and amputation continue to be sanctioned by the state.

What is lacking today is the moral resolve to elevate the rights of Iranian citizens as a matter of international priority. But this is not just a moral issue; it is a legal issue. Iran has legal obligations to uphold the rights of its citizens, and states have an international obligation to address their conditions appropriately. The Obama administration’s single-minded focus on the nuclear issue has come at a very high cost for Iranians who risked their lives to attain their democratic rights. Iran’s theocracy, seemingly the only beneficiary, has gotten a free ticket to punish them viciously.

On June 20, 2009, the day Neda Agha Soltan was gunned down on a Tehran street, President Obama quoted Martin Luther King when he said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The first step to attaining justice is to build recognition of injustice. The Iranian people need the UN’s help — as did the citizens of Chile, South Africa, and Hungary — to attain justice. At the UN General Assembly meeting this fall, the United States has another opportunity to help them by ensuring the establishment of a UN mandate that will investigate abuses and encourage accountability for those perpetrating crimes in Iran. We should not miss it again.

Dokhi Fassihian is the executive director of the Democracy Coalition Project.