Procedure without Justice: Iran and the Quiet Failure of Global Responsibility
by Milad Milani
One of the most troubling features of our current global order is not that injustice occurs, but that it can be indefinitely managed, deferred, and rendered procedurally invisible.
The international system was never designed to be morally ideal. Institutions such as the United Nations emerged above all to manage great-power rivalry, stabilize sovereignty, and prevent systemic war. Human rights, while rhetorically central, were always institutionally secondary—invoked selectively and enforced unevenly.
Yet today, the ethical cost of that design feels increasingly visible.
Nowhere is this dynamic more clearly illustrated than in the international community’s inability to move beyond condemnation toward meaningful accountability for the Iranian regime’s ongoing crackdown on its own citizens. The evidence is abundant. The suffering is visible. The legal mechanisms, at least in theory, exist. And yet the path toward international legal escalation—particularly through the International Criminal Court—remains blocked.
The blockage of accountability is especially evident in relation to the International Criminal Court. While the ICC does not operate under the same veto structure as the Security Council, its jurisdiction remains constrained by state consent, referral mechanisms, and enforcement capacity. In cases such as Iran—where the state signed but never ratified the Rome Statute, and is therefore not subject to the Court’s jurisdiction—meaningful escalation depends on Security Council referral, which returns the question of justice to the logic of great-power alignment.
Not because the case is unclear. But because the system itself has learned how to neutralize moral urgency.
At the center of this paralysis lies the veto power of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China’s repeated use of the veto is often framed as obstructionism, or as cynical geopolitical maneuvering. But this framing, while emotionally satisfying, risks missing the deeper ethical problem. The veto does not deny that violence is occurring. It does not dispute that rights are being violated. It simply prevents consequence.
The veto suspends justice without ever having to argue against it.
This is a crucial distinction. What we are witnessing is not a clash over facts or values, but a quiet triumph of institutional process over responsibility. International law remains intact on paper, while its activation is indefinitely postponed by strategic alignment. The result is a form of moral stasis: the appearance of order without the substance of justice.
Iran, in this sense, is not an exception. It is a case study.
The regime’s actions—mass arrests, executions, suppression of dissent—have been widely documented. Calls for international accountability are not radical demands; they are appeals made within the existing legal framework. Yet escalation stalls, not because evidence is lacking, but because the geopolitical cost of action outweighs the moral cost of inaction for powerful states.
This is where the ethical terrain becomes especially delicate.
The use of the veto by Russia and China does not rest on an assessment of Iran’s internal moral order, nor does it require an endorsement of repression. Their position is shaped by a broader logic: resistance to Western-led interventionism, preservation of sovereignty norms, and the maintenance of a global balance that limits external scrutiny of domestic conduct—including their own.
In this sense, the veto reflects not moral indifference, but moral displacement. Human suffering is not denied; it is subordinated to strategic continuity.
What emerges from this dynamic is not simply division, but a new form of convergence. A world increasingly organized around blocs that shield one another from accountability, bound together less by shared values than by shared interests. Power protects power. And the human cost is externalized.
The deeper tragedy is not that global actors disagree. Disagreement is inevitable. It is that the system now functions in a way that allows all sides to appear principled while innocence remains unprotected. Western powers issue statements and sanctions, constrained by their own inconsistencies and past interventions. Eastern powers invoke sovereignty and non-interference, secure in the knowledge that procedure itself will do the work of delay.
Between them, ordinary people are crushed—not by ideology alone, but by the architecture of global order.
When procedure is absorbed into great-power competition—serving delay and stability rather than accountability—justice quietly disappears without ever being openly opposed.
This is the ethical wound that should concern us most. Not merely the failure to act in Iran’s case, but the gradual shrinking of the global moral imagination. Accountability becomes conditional. Law becomes selectively activated. Suffering becomes a negotiable variable within the calculus of stability.
The world now stands clearly divided, not simply between East and West, but between those for whom power remains accountable to human life and those for whom human life is an acceptable cost of geopolitical equilibrium. Yet even this division is misleading. In practice, the major powers increasingly resemble one another in the same tragic way: all claim restraint, all invoke process, and all manage outrage until it fades.
The lives lost in Iran are not lost because no one knows. They are lost because knowing no longer compels.
This is not a call for reckless intervention, nor an argument for moral absolutism. It is an invitation to reckon honestly with what our systems now permit. A reminder that legality without consequence is not neutrality—it is abdication.
The tragedy of our divided world is not simply that powers compete, but that in doing so they increasingly agree—implicitly—that the lives of ordinary people are expendable within the calculus of stability.
In such a world, the question is no longer who is right, but what kind of order we have learned to accept.
Milad Milani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Sydney University. His work explores Islamic thought, mysticism, ethics, and political theology, with particular attention to questions of authority, tradition, and modernity. He is the author of Heidegger, Ontology, and the Destiny of Islam.