So you think.

Those who challenge the state know differently. This is a country where the Prime Minister invoked martial law in order to quell the threat of Quebec nationalism when two minor officials were kidnapped by a small revolutionary clique. Where the RCMP actively sent agent provocateurs into the midst of opposition groups to discredit them, buying dynamite to trump up evidence against people, burning down barns to prevent political meetings from taking place, stolen the membership lists of legal democratic parties, and when this was discovered, they held an inquirey and founded a new organization to do the same kinds of contelipro opreations, legaly. They called it CSIS, the very same CSIS that aided an abetted the torture of a teenager in Guantanmo Bay, and is "scolded" for doing so. A country where a police officer shoots a native activist and is given two years of community service for criminal negligence. And that is just here.

In the grand scheme, when we talk about here, we are talking about "the west" and particularly the USA. And if you really think that there is real legal protection for human rights for individuals and groups, in the United States you are seriously deluded. Nazis who march through black suburbs of Toledo are given police protection. Black people are murdered by law enforcement officers routinely, almost as if it is in the line of duty, executing them in full public view, or shooting them even when they follow instructions. Rioting takes place when the disenfranchised mass react to these blatant abuses, and for some reason here you seem to think we can determine that the violence is the fault of the protestors, and not a "police riot", whereas you insist that the violence perpetrated by people of Iran against police repression is justifiable. Even peaceful protests are routinely broken up violently by the police.

On the one hand you assert that narrative given by Iranian state media about how rioting is instigated by lawless elements is entirely false, but turn around and assert the same narrative when given by the mainstream media in the west, is essentially true... the work of anarchists and other lawless elements.

So yes, there is a difference. The unmasked brutality of the state is always availble to the powers that be, in direct ratio to the evident threat to authority. Were there a serious challenge to the reigning authority in the US, I believe the violence unleashed by the state would more than likely make what has been happening in Iran look like a tea party. When it comes down to it what you call the paper upon which the "legal protection for human rights of individuals and groups" exists is indeed very thin.