Brussels was chosen deliberately. The European institutions are not the audience for ISAD's internal deliberations, but they are the audience for the policy positions that those deliberations produce. To convene in the same city as the Parliament and Commission is to remind delegates — and ourselves — that the distance between a working session and a formal submission is shorter than it appears.
The convention ran across two days. The first was devoted to chapter coordination: each of the seven delegations presented its current advocacy priorities and the external relationships — with academic institutions, legal bodies, and press — that it had established in the preceding year. The purpose was not to centralise but to make legible the distributed work the network had already accomplished, and to identify where parallel efforts could become joint ones.
The second day turned outward. A working draft of the association's unified position on diaspora political engagement — developed by the documentation committee in the wake of the October General Assembly — was tabled, amended, and approved for submission. The document addresses three questions: the conditions under which diaspora organisations can claim democratic legitimacy; the relationship between advocacy abroad and political transition at home; and the obligations that European democratic institutions bear toward Iranian civil society.
02 · What the convention agreedThree commitments emerged from the final plenary. First, that the seven European chapters would coordinate their submissions to European parliamentary hearings, speaking from a shared factual record while retaining their individual voices. Second, that a joint legal working group would be established to monitor the status of Iranian political prisoners currently subject to European jurisdiction. Third, that the next European convention would take place in Paris, in the spring of 2025.
"Diaspora organisations do not speak for the people inside. They speak about what is being done to them — and to those who did it, they are accountable."
The convention closed on the evening of 29 November with a reception for chapter leads and invited observers. The minutes, including the full text of the approved policy position, will be circulated to all ISAD members within three weeks and published in the association's archive thereafter.
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