South Africa G20 presidency gavel
By Nkateko Muloiwa
South Africa’s post-1994 foreign policy foundations established non-alignment, constitutional adherence and human rights as central principles guiding Pretoria’s relations with other states. However, recent actions, specifically the government silence and cooperation with states that openly violate these principles, raise significant concerns. Despite its declared commitments, the South African government’s response or lack thereof, to Iran’s misconducts demonstrate a decisive shift from its foundational foreign policy ideals, revealing a tendency to prioritise political alliances over consistent application of human rights and non-alignment.
Silence over Iran’s human rights violation serves as an indictment on the South African government. It poses both a moral and ideological conundrum for the country whereby, “We are blind to violations committed by our friends and vocal to those committed by our enemies”. A dichotomy that belongs in the dustbins of history.
Importantly, the silence over atrocities committed in Tehran reinforces systems of exclusion in the international system; simultaneously deepen human indignation.
Non-Alignment
A comprehensive understanding of non-alignment is essential to grasp why it has become central to South Africa’s apparent complacency towards Iran’s domestic misconducts:
Non-alignment has long been a cornerstone of South Africa’s post-apartheid foreign policy. Historically, the concept gained prominence as newly independent states and liberation movements sought to transcend the Cold War binary of Western versus Soviet alignment. Movements such as the ANC appropriated non-alignment to signal a moral commitment to freedom and self-determination without the rigid and often compromising demands that accompanied great-power patronage.
At its core, the non-aligned project aimed to prevent post-colonial states from reproducing the coercive habits of their former colonisers through dependency on external powers. It was intended to protect political autonomy and to resist oppression, imperialism, authoritarianism, and political violence regardless of where these emerged. Properly understood, non-alignment is not “neutrality between the boot and the neck”; it is independence of judgment, especially when the facts are inconvenient.
For South Africa, this principle carried additional weight because of the ANC’s history as a liberation movement. In theory, it implied solidarity with oppressed peoples without regard to the identity of the perpetrating state. This orientation once projected a consistent ethical posture in South Africa’s diplomacy, but that consistency has become increasingly difficult to sustain in practice.
If non-alignment were applied rigorously to Iran, three implications follow. First, it requires separating peoples from states: South Africa can oppose unlawful attacks on Iranian territory while simultaneously condemning the repression of Iranian civil society; these positions are not contradictory but ethically coherent. Second, it requires using multilateralism without treating it as a shield: if UN mechanisms and findings are credible enough to invoke in other conflicts, they are credible enough when UN bodies document Iran’s repression as involving gross human-rights violations and, in some accounts, possible crimes against humanity. Third, it requires symmetry: non-alignment cannot permit exemptions for allies, strategic partners, or members of fashionable geopolitical blocs. South Africa need not become a proxy for any Western power to state plainly that torture, mass arrests, and lethal force against protesters are unacceptable—whoever commits them.
Successive ANC governments, however, have often diluted these standards, whether out of political caution, selective solidarity, or the residual pull of historical allegiances formed during the apartheid era. The result is a widening gap between the moral language of non-alignment and its uneven application—raising the question of how long principled foreign policy can be deferred behind rhetorical justifications.
Iran and the human-rights reality
On Iran, the factual record is not ambiguous. A UN Fact-Finding Mission reported that, in repressing the nationwide protests of 2022, Iranian state authorities committed “gross human rights violations,” some of which the Mission found may have amounted to “crimes against humanity.” The Mission also documented disturbing allegations of torture and serious due-process violations, including cases involving children, and noted the targeting of ethnic and religious minorities in the protest context.
This assessment is reinforced by other multilateral processes. A UN summary of the General Assembly Third Committee resolution on Iran (November 2024) highlighted concerns that included an “alarming increase” in the use of the death penalty, systematic repression of women and girls, and a wider pattern of entrenched abuses. Whatever one’s view of Western double standards, these findings cannot credibly be dismissed as mere “cultural differences.” They reflect allegations of severe coercion and violence evaluated in multilateral forums in which Global South states also participate and shape outcomes.
More recently, Amnesty International reported that it had gathered evidence pointing to a coordinated escalation in Iranian security forces’ unlawful use of lethal force against mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders in January 2026. Individual incidents may be contested by governments, and specific claims can always be scrutinised, but the broader pattern remains consistent across multiple credible monitors: repression, harsh punishment, and a steadily shrinking civic space.
South Africa’s selective voice on Iran
South Africa is not indifferent to Iran, far from it. When Israel attacked Iran in February 2025, DIRCO issued a firm statement condemning the strike as an “unacceptable violation of Iran’s sovereignty.” In June 2025, the Presidency urged the United States, Israel, and Iran to allow the United Nations space to lead a peaceful resolution of disputes, including questions of inspections and verification related to Iran’s uranium enrichment. These interventions show that Pretoria can respond quickly, clearly, and at a high level when the issue concerns Iran’s external security and territorial sovereignty.
What is striking, however, is how infrequently comparable urgency appears when the issue is the Iranian state’s coercion and violence against its own citizens. This imbalance feeds a perception, whether fully fair or not, that South Africa’s non-alignment is drifting into a posture that shields states from scrutiny rather than protecting people from abuse. In other words, the principle begins to look less like independent judgment and more like selective restraint.
There are plausible reasons for caution, and they should be acknowledged. Governments often justify “quiet diplomacy” by arguing that public condemnation closes channels, endangers diplomats, or reduces leverage for humanitarian outcomes. South Africa also has a legitimate concern about the instrumentalisation of human-rights discourse by powerful states that invoke rights language abroad while violating rights at home. Yet quiet diplomacy becomes indistinguishable from acquiescence when it is not paired with visible, consistent standards—especially when condemnation is readily available in other cases.
A further complication is domestic political perception. When South Africans hear officials speak in moral absolutes about certain violations but shift into procedural language, “dialogue,” “space,” “verification” for others, the message that lands is rarely “nuance.” It reads as hierarchy: some victims receive a megaphone, while others are managed through diplomatic euphemism.
Even where South Africa participates in accountability mechanisms, the political signal can remain muted. In July 2025, the President of the UN Human Rights Council appointed South African legal expert Max du Plessis to the Iran Fact-Finding Mission, whose mandate the UN has repeatedly extended and expanded to investigate serious violations. That appointment reflects meaningful South African expertise within international processes. But participation without an accompanying public articulation of principle can look like outsourcing moral clarity to Geneva while Pretoria avoids committing itself at home.
Ultimately, the credibility of South Africa’s foreign policy will hinge on whether it restores non-alignment to its original meaning: principled independence anchored in constitutional values, not selective solidarity shaped by convenience. Pretoria can defend sovereignty and oppose external aggression while also speaking plainly about torture, repression, and the systematic shrinking of civic space inside Iran—because a rights-based internationalism is measured precisely by its willingness to apply standards to friends as well as foes.
If South Africa continues to reserve moral clarity for adversaries while offering procedural restraint for partners, it will weaken its own diplomatic authority, hollow out the emancipatory legacy it claims to uphold, and entrench a global order in which state protection is prioritised over human protection. Reclaiming consistency is therefore not a rhetorical exercise but a strategic and ethical necessity: without symmetry in judgment, non-alignment becomes indistinguishable from complicity, and human rights become a language of preference rather than principle.