by Mani Mostofi and Melody Kazemi
On May 7, Alena Douhan, the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights (UNSR) visited Iran to investigate the negative human rights impact of the United States’ sanctions on the country. In her past work, the UNSR on UCM has focused on economic and social rights including access to medicine and food and is likely to have the same focus on Iran in which these issues have been important. UNSR, however, should not overlook the inadvertent impact sanctions have had on internet freedom in Iran.
The UNSR is a mandate created by the UN Human Rights Council in 2014 with the primary backing of states like Russia and Cuba. Douhan’s visit to Iran has been criticised by some human rights groups, who argue the Islamic Republic is avoiding accountability for its own stark human rights record, while facilitating an investigation of the human rights harms caused by the policies of other governments. Indeed, Iran has denied access to fourteen other UN human rights monitors that have requested to visit the country since 2004, including the Special Rapporteur of the human rights situation in Islamic Republic of Iran. The last time any special rapporteur was allowed to enter Iran was in 2004.
Regardless of what approach the UNSR takes, Filterwatch has observed that sanctions have indirectly eroded digital rights to a degree worthy of serious discussion. Most significantly, sanctions compliance, and overcompliance, by international tech companies has exacerbated the information controls faced by Iranians, forcing them to rely on less secure domestic platforms, while helping to accelerate the development of Iran’s localised and domestically controlled internet known as the National Information Network (NIN).
On a day-to-day basis the Islamic Republic is responsible for relentlessly restricting Iranians’ free access to the internet. States authorities have long worked to control free expression and access to information by blocking technologies, censoring content, surveilling online activity, and arresting people for online speech. Still, a complete picture requires us to look at how sanctions have indirectly bolstered the ability of Iranian authorities to control the internet and the behaviour of users in the country.
Limiting access to international online tools and services
The US Treasury has exempted, alongside humanitarian trade, some telecommunication devices and services from its sanctions restrictions under its General Licence D1. These exemptions, however, have not gone far enough to prevent international banks and companies from blocking services to Iran out of fear of running afoul of the myriad US sanctions. This has had a negative effect on the ability of tech firms to effectively make their services available to Iranian users.
According to a list maintained by an Iranian internet user, at least 300 companies have restricted their services to Iranians as of July 2020, although a more up-to-date figure could be higher. This list includes services such as Zoom, the majority of Google services as well as educational services like Udemy.
These international services have often cut access to Iranians at short notice, disrupting students’ access to education, and businesses to vital development software and hosting services. These services have been even more crucial during the Covid-19 pandemic as people rely more heavily on technological and online solutions to reduce the negative impact of the pandemic on their daily lives. For example, in February 2021, Iranian Member of Parliament Elham Azad, claimed that she was unable to attend an online Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) meeting due to the accessibility of the platform as a result of “sanctions”. Though Azad did not mention the name of the platform, a number of video conferencing platforms such as Zoom are not accessible in Iran.
Restrictions on Iranians’ ability to use international tools and services have only made it more difficult for Iranians to exercise their rights to access information and freedom of expression in a highly censored Iranian online environment, where authorities bullishly block a wide range of international content and services, especially social media and news outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and BBC Persian.
Sanctions overcompliance has at times also infringed upon Iranians’ fundamental right to freedom of expression. In January 2020, following the assassination of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Major General Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike, Instagram–one of the few remaining international platforms not blocked by Iranian authorities–removed a number of posts and accounts posting about the incident. The company attributed this action to the IRGC’s terrorist designation by the US government. While some of the removals may have been justified in compliance with US terrorist designations, at least 15 Iranian journalists’ accounts were reportedly suspended while posts by activists, and human rights advocates were also removed. Posts marking the anniversary of Soleimani’s death continue to be restricted on Instagram.
These sanctions have impacted Iranian users outside of Iran as well, suggesting extensive instances of sanctions overcompliance. In December 2018 the American communication platform, Slack, emailed Iranian users outside Iran advising them of account closures, citing US sanctions. The company later apologised for their action and stated that access to these accounts had been restored. More recently, in January 2020, a Twitter user shared an email from the e-commerce platform, Etsy, stating that they had removed ‘Persian dolls’ listed for sale from the platform due to sanctions, despite the dolls being made in and with material from the US, according to the user. Another example of sanctions overcompliance was reported in August 2021 when a UK-based individual attempted to buy a ‘Persian rug mouse pad’ on Etsy and ended up facing a PayPal account suspension due to sanctions.
Accelerating development of the National Information Network
International sanctions have effectively accelerated the development of the NIN. The NIN is a locally controlled internet that increases the capacity of the authorities to censor online content, limit internet access, and surveil users.
The NIN threatens Iranians’ internet freedoms by giving the government greater control over the internet infrastructure, online content, and access to users’ personal data and online behaviours. The NIN attempts to create an online environment in which Iranian users are forced to rely mostly on local services and apps, by making international services unavailable, slower, or more expensive. For example, the use of data on domestic online services hosted via the NIN is priced at a lower rate than international internet data.
By localising the online traffic on platforms hosted inside Iran, authorities can increase surveillance and controls over content. This is especially alarming in light of the broad content-based criminal offences enabled by the Computer Crimes Law of 2010.
The NIN is dependent on Iranian-developed services, like messaging apps or ride sharing apps, being located on servers inside the country. Sanctions have obliged this need by legally prohibiting Iranian developers from utilising international cloud services. Some international cloud providers, such as Digital Ocean, refused to provide hosting to Iranian private sector services at short notice. In turn, these Iranian services were forced to migrate onto domestic servers, which are relatively unsafe hosting tools. Not only do they potentially compromise users’ data, they may also subject them to state surveillance.
The National Information Network and Internet Shutdowns
By accelerating the growth of the NIN, US-led sanctions have unintentionally made it less costly for Iranian authorities to shut down the internet at will. Iranian authorities have increasingly used internet shutdowns and throttling during politically sensitive times, especially large scale protests. Indeed, since 2018 authorities have shut down the internet in full or in-part nine times.
Shutdowns and throttling allow authorities much greater control over the flow of information and communications. Authorities employed such tactics during their bloody crackdown on the November 2019 nationwide internet shutdown and in a number of other localised internet shutdowns since that time such as the localised internet shutdown in Khuzestan Province in July 2021.
Shutdowns, however, disrupt business and come with potentially great economic, and thus political, costs. The November 2019 shutdown, which lasted a week, reportedly cost the Iranian economy between $496 million and $1.5 billion USD. However, during this period local NIN online services remained largely functional, meaning a lot of the domestic commerce was uninterrupted. As such, the cost of the 2019 shutdown would likely have been much higher without the NIN remaining operational. To date authorities remain keen on making sure shutdowns and throttling have minimal impact on business.
Failure of Tech Sanctions Exemption and a Path Forward
The Office for Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the US Treasury issued a general licence to allow for the export of certain types of free technologies such as messaging and social media services, along with the introduction of the General Licence D1, which expanded the list of such allowances to include fee-paying services for personal use. While general licences are welcome practices, they have proven ineffective at encouraging companies to conduct business with and offer services to Iranians. Due to a lack of clarity around sanctions compliance, many are fearful of incurring penalties associated with inadvertent sanction violations. Individual licences can be acquired from OFAC on a case by case basis to ensure offering specific services are not in violation of US sanctions.
So far, GitHub is the only high profile tech company which has acquired a specific licence to offer services previously restricted to Iranians, an onerous process which took two years before the licence was granted in 2021, according to GitHub. Lack of clarity around the application and a lengthy and strenuous process, as well as potential additional costs is likely to discourage tech platforms from acquiring such licences.
Negotiations around renewal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (i.e., the Iran nuclear deal) could lead to the removal of sanctions that have caused the above mentioned issues. Negotiations have stalled however.
If sanctions are not removed in a diplomatic settlement, at minimum, further clarification and specific guidance is required from the US government and OFAC on sanctions exemptions and the applicability of licences such as General Licence D1. Additional support and guidance is needed with regard to case-by-case licences to ease the process and make it less time consuming and costly for tech companies to encourage their application for special licences.
Additionally, the US government and OFAC need to provide financial and banking channels so that payments can be made by Iranians for sanctions exempt services, as currently banks and payment institutions are prevented from offering their services to Iranians which makes it impossible for them to access sanction exempt services.
