THE BRITISH COMMITTEE FOR IRAN FREEDOM
Conference to Support Iranian People’s Fight for Human Rights and Justice
Committee Room 3A, House of Lords.
Tuesday 12 December 17.30-19.00hrs.
IRAN’S MULLAHS ON KILLING SPREE
Does the United Nations know no shame? As an organization created to implement and uphold the highest ideals of peace, justice, and human rights, how is it possible that an ambassador from Iran’s theocratic fascist regime was appointed as chair of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum last month? The appointment of Ambassador Ali Bahreini made a mockery of the universal declaration of human rights and international conventions, given that Iran is the leading violator of these principles. How can an agent of the mullahs’ regime, that has implemented a killing spree of executions, designed to terrorize the population and quell political unrest, take on this role?
In a wave of hangings, the criminal regime has executed several prisoners of conscience and protesters who took part in the nationwide uprising, as well as prisoners who were underage when they were arrested. Those executed are routinely brutally tortured into making false confessions. Dozens of prisoners on death row are currently being transferred to solitary cells to await execution. How can the UN contemplate the Bahreini appointment when it has itself launched an international fact-finding commission to investigate the crimes of the regime during the uprising, where the mullahs’ regime killed 750 and arrested a further 30,000? The UN is also actively investigating the 1988 massacre of more than 30,000 supporters of the main opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq, an act of genocide in which the current Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’, played a key role as an executioner.
The UN’s special rapporteur on Iran - Javaid Rehman, told the UNHRC that he was alarmed by the scale and gravity of the reported cases of murder, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, rape and persecution in the Islamic Republic. He has called for an international fact-finding mission to investigate them. On December 15, last year, the United Nations General Assembly denounced the brutal and systematic violation of human rights in Iran yet has now rewarded the tyrannical regime with a key human rights appointment!
It is shameful and exposes the degeneracy at the heart of the UN that enables pariah nations and human rights violators like Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran to hold the civilized world to ransom. Bahreini’s appointment is being interpreted by the regime as a green light for more torture and more killing. The mullahs will reassure their brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) thugs that such international endorsement of their regime validifies their use of torture and execution as a means of repression.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the Ministry of Internal Security (MOIS) in Tehran use their embassies as terror cells and deploy their ambassadors as terrorists. One of the clearest examples of this was the Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi who was caught red-handed, passing a bomb, professionally prepared in Tehran and flown to Europe in his diplomatic pouch, to three co-conspirators and instructing them to detonate it a major Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018. Assadi and his co-conspirators were sentenced to long jail terms in Belgium on terror charges. Shamefully, Assadi was released by the Belgians in exchange for a Belgian charity worker who had been held hostage by the mullahs and sentenced to 40 years jail, 74 lashes and a $1m fine, on trumped-up espionage charges.
As the clerical regime enters its final phase, it is high time for the world to take concrete measures to hold it accountable for its egregious human rights violations. Iranians must be allowed to exercise their fundamental human rights without fear of reprisal. While the regime continues to fan the flames of war in the Middle East, its main goal is to maintain its hold on power at home. This is why in tandem with its warmongering policies, it has resorted to increasing its repressive measures against its own people. The bloodthirsty mullahs think that by waging war in the region and killing youths inside Iran, it can delay or stop the next wave of uprisings. But these crimes will only increase the people’s determination to overthrow this evil dictatorship.
The United Nations, the US, the European Union and the UK, must strongly condemn this regime for its arbitrary executions and take urgent action to save the death-row prisoners, especially political prisoners. The mullahs do not represent the people of Iran and should be expelled from the United Nations.
