Who speaks for Iran?

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Hanspeter Rosenlechner

An open letter to the Iran diaspora

The Islamic Republic is collapsing. What comes next will be determined not only by what happens inside Iran, but by whether those outside it can demonstrate something the regime never could: the ability to put Iran before themselves.

What is currently visible in the diaspora is not encouraging. Monarchists and republicans, MEK supporters and secular leftists, Kurdish federalists and Persian nationalists — each group convinced of its own mandate, each dismissing the others’ legitimacy. Reza Pahlavi draws on popular acclaim. Maryam Rajavi draws on decades of organization and international recognition. Others draw on ideology, on exile networks, on foreign backing. All claim to represent the Iranian people.

None of them do. Not because their intentions are wrong, but because representation cannot be claimed. It must be demonstrated.

This is precisely where the Arab Spring failed. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria — every transition collapsed not because of the old regime, but because the legitimacy vacuum was filled by competing factions fighting for power, each convinced its mandate was sufficient. The result was not democracy but a new cycle of authoritarianism, civil war, or chaos. Iran faces the same structural danger. And the diaspora’s current fragmentation is not a preview of Iranian democracy. It is a preview of its failure.

There is one question that cuts through every claim to legitimacy: Would you accept an outcome you did not shape?

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Filed under: Deliberation, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , | 6 Comments »

In Defence of Trial by Jury

Posted on March 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Editor note: This post has been substantially revised following a note from James Kierstead.

The UK government is aiming to reduce the use of trial juries in the UK, claiming this is useful in order to “modernise the criminal courts” and “save victims from pain and anguish of delays”. Under the proposal “cases with a likely sentence of three years or less heard by a Judge alone – estimated to take 20% less time than a jury trial”.

James Kierstead, who has written before about sortition and its history, writing in spiked, makes several good points regarding juries and the attempt to reduce their purview, highlighting the hypocrisy and manipulation behind the government’s claims.

Labour’s attack on jury trials is an attack on democracy

Justice secretary David Lammy’s plans will take yet more power out of ordinary people’s hands.

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend In Defence of Trial by Jury, a panel event co-organised by spiked and the Free Speech Union. The event was a response to UK justice secretary David Lammy’s absurd plans to reduce the number of Crown Court cases that go before juries.

The panel members questioned Lammy’s assumption that jury trials were to blame for the Crown Court’s current backlog of almost 78,000 cases (rather than, say, a lack of funding or the number of spurious claims that now make it to court). And they emphasised the centrality of jury trials to our liberal institutions and to the common law, which has long been a bulwark of liberty in Britain, as in other English-speaking countries.

Yet one thing that struck me about the panellists’ excellent contributions is that they all centred on what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called ‘negative’ liberties – our freedom from coercion by the state – rather than on ‘positive’ liberties – our freedom to participate in decision-making with our fellow citizens. In other words, the contributions had more to say about liberalism than about democracy.

The threat to civil liberties posed by Lammy’s jury-trial plans is not to be underestimated. Especially at a time when Brits can be charged with ‘inciting racial hatred’ for expressing concern about illegal immigration on social media, as was the position of former Royal Marine Jamie Michael last year. Michael, as it happened, was cleared by a jury of his peers after only 17 minutes. It is understandable to wonder what might have happened had a judge from our current legal elite decided the verdict.
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Filed under: Juries, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »