Eli Lake, Columnist

Iran's Nobel Laureate Is Done With Reform. She Wants Regime Change.

This activist says Iranians want to eliminate the position of supreme leader. The West can help.

April 5, 2018 at 5:32 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer.
Photographer: Michal Fludra/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

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Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights lawyer, has had enough. For years she represented her country's dissidents in the Islamic Republic's corrupt courts. She spoke out for the rights of women, minorities and students abroad. But she never called for the end of the regime she was fighting to reform. Until now.

"Reform is useless in Iran," Ebadi told me in an interview Thursday. "The Iranian people are very dissatisfied with their current government. They have reached the point and realized this system is not reformable."