The local consequences of selective human rights activism
Forough Amin is an Iranian New Zealander, a commentator and writer on Iran and a women’s rights advocate.
OPINION: On Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, April 14, Auckland Council’s policy, planning and development committee voted 14–2 to request a report on sanctioning companies linked to Israeli settlement activity. The timing alone is striking. Whether intentional or not, it places a highly contested international issue within a deeply sensitive historical moment.
This move marks a notable moment for activist groups in New Zealand, particularly organisations such as the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA), which has been a key advocate behind these efforts. It reflects the growing influence of advocacy networks in shaping how global conflicts are brought into local political decision-making.
Advocacy groups play an important role in democratic societies. They raise awareness, mobilise communities, and bring moral questions into public debate. But when local government decisions appear closely aligned with specific activist agendas, it raises a more complicated question: whose voices are shaping public policy, and are elected institutions maintaining independent judgement?
This is not an argument about the legal or moral merits of the council’s decision, nor a relitigation of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The more pressing issue lies elsewhere; what these developments reveal about the nature of contemporary “human rights” activism, and how selectively it is applied.
As someone from the Middle East, I view these developments through a different lens. From a distance, global conflicts are often simplified into clear narratives of right and wrong. On the ground, however, they are entangled in complex ideological, political and historical currents.
After the events of October 7, 2023, I attended several pro-Palestinian rallies in New Zealand, motivated by concern for civilians caught in war. At first, the message seemed straightforward: solidarity with people suffering. But over time, I became increasingly uneasy.
Alongside genuine calls for peace, I began to notice symbols and narratives aligned with the Iranian regime; an Islamist system that many Iranians, including myself, have spent years resisting.
For those unfamiliar with Iran’s internal reality, such symbols may appear distant or irrelevant. For Iranians, they represent a system defined by repression, control and violence against its own people.
That experience forced a difficult realisation: movements that appear unified from afar often contain deeply conflicting ideologies. And for those who have lived under such systems, these contradictions are not abstract; they are personal.
This is where the question of selectivity becomes unavoidable.
When Iranian women took to the streets in 2022 under the banner of “Woman, Life, Freedom”, their demand was simple: basic human rights. Yet there were no sustained international campaigns, no large-scale institutional pressure, and no enduring activist infrastructure from the same global networks that mobilise rapidly for other causes.
A similar silence has surrounded Afghan women, whose exclusion from education and public life has been one of the clearest human rights issues in recent years. If human rights advocacy were truly universal, these cases would be among its most visible and unifying causes.
Even more striking has been the response to events in Iran in January 2026. Following an internet blackout and massacre of tens of thousands of protesters, the same global activist networks that organise protests, boycotts and institutional campaigns elsewhere were largely absent. None of them made any effort to engage with Iranian communities worldwide; neither to offer support nor even to express basic solidarity.
This absence alone raises questions. But the issue goes further.
Within some “human rights” spaces and within networks connected to groups like the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, symbols and messaging associated with the Iranian regime have appeared without meaningful challenge. This creates a contradiction that is difficult to reconcile.
A movement that claims to stand for human rights, yet overlooks or even tolerates symbols of a regime known for suppressing those rights, cannot easily sustain a claim to universality. It suggests that what is being presented as a human rights framework may, in practice, be shaped by political alignment rather than consistent principle.
This brings us back to Auckland Council.
If a local government is prepared to act whether symbolically or materially on one international issue, why not others? Why this conflict, and not others of comparable urgency? This is where governance begins to blur into activism, and where institutional neutrality becomes harder to maintain.
The implications are not confined to foreign policy debates. They are felt locally.
When public institutions adopt positions on polarising international issues, they do not do so in a vacuum. They can unintentionally amplify divisions already present within society. In diverse communities like New Zealand, where social cohesion depends on a shared sense of belonging, this matters.
One of the most sensitive consequences is the potential impact on Jewish communities. Globally, there has been a rise in antisemitic incidents alongside intensified activism around the Israel–Palestine conflict. While criticism of a state is not inherently antisemitic, the line can become blurred particularly when one country is repeatedly singled out in highly visible and symbolic ways.
For some Jewish New Zealanders, decisions like this can be experienced as signals about inclusion, security, and whether public institutions fully recognise the impact of their actions.
None of this means that global injustices should be ignored, or that public debate should be avoided. But it does mean that consistency matters. If human rights are to serve as a guiding principle, they must be applied evenly, not selectively, not symbolically, and not in ways that align only with certain political narratives.
Auckland Council’s decision may have been intended as a statement about global justice. But in practice, it raises a deeper and more uncomfortable question: whether the frameworks shaping such decisions are truly grounded in universal human rights or in something far more selective.
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