Extract of remarks made by Lord Alton of Liverpool to a meeting held in the UK Parliament on Human Rights Violations in Iran
President-elect, Madam Rajavi, colleagues, and friends,
We gather today on the eve of the anniversary of the 2022 popular uprising in Iran to urge our Government to end the impunity that has allowed the regime to survive at the expense of the Iranian people.
Over the weekend I came across an op-ed which I wrote in 2003 criticising the then Home Secretary for proscribing the Iranian Resistance and asked how could the UK continue with “business as usual” with more than 400 people already executed that year – with 10 people stones to death between March and August – a regime responsible for the deaths of what was then an estimated 120,000 political prisoners.
I contrasted the Government’s burgeoning love affair with a regime developing weapons of mass destruction and its attitude towards those committed to democracy, human rights and the creation of a plural, diverse society.
I find it passing strange – to put it mildly – that having myself been sanctioned by Iran for speaking out on their record on human rights and global security – that the UK would try to proscribe the democratic opposition in Iran and fails to list the IRGC as a terrorist organisation.
Looking back through earlier interventions I also came across a March 1986 pamphlet from the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, chaired by my friend the late Lord Avebury. It highlighted executions, torture, the complete absence of fair trials, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and the vicious treatment of political opponents.
Nothing has changed. Since then, Governments have come and gone and the threat posed by a regime which we have too often appeased has simply got worse and worse: now described by the Government’s Reviewer of national defence issues as part of a “deadly quartet.”
But while we have equivocated, accommodated and appeased the Iranian people themselves have increasingly and courageously taken on the dictatorship under which they suffer.
Two years since the 2022 popular uprising in Iran. protests and strikes across all sectors of Iranian society continue to push for democratic change despite record executions. Spearheaded by the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which provides a viable alternative, mobilizes resistance units inside Iran, and gains international support for the Iranian people’s fight for democracy and freedom.
How deadly that regime is has been underlined by two reports published by the UN – one by the UN Fact-finding Mission in March and another by the departing UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Professor Javaid Rehman, on 17 July – concludes that past and current human rights violations by the regime amount to crimes against humanity. While the UN Fact-Finding Mission documents current atrocities with respect to the state crackdown on the recent popular protests and the protest movement, the investigative report by Mr Rehman documents the regime’s past atrocity crimes during the 1980s and 1988.
The report concludes that “An overwhelming majority of the executed persons were members and sympathisers of PMOI … There is considerable evidence that mass killings, torture and other inhumane acts against members of PMOI were conducted with genocidal intent.”
It further states that the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners amounts to an ongoing crimes against humanity of enforced disappearances as many victims were buried in secret graves and as the authorities refuse to clarify the fate of the victims and disclose the whereabouts of their remains for the families.
I commend Mr. Rehman for his remarkable courage in documenting the truth despite personal attacks by the regime. I urged the UN High Commissioner to condemn these attacks in a letter on 29 August on behalf of myself and my cross-party colleagues in the British Committee for Iran Freedom,
Mr. Rehman’s report is a landmark step for justice for the victims and the Iranian people. The international community must no longer ignore the overwhelming evidence of these crimes. If the ICC can issue an arrest warrant for Putin, it must also do so for Khamenei and other regime leaders responsible for crimes against humanity.
As Mr. Rehman warned, had the international community intervened in the 1980s, we would not be witnessing today’s large-scale executions. We must not engage with a regime whose leaders have committed atrocity crimes.
I call on our Government to work with allies to establish the accountability mechanism Mr. Rehman recommends, to hold the regime accountable for its crimes against humanity. Our failure to act only emboldens the regime to further undermine international law.
As co-sponsors of the UN resolution on Iran, our Government should demand a specific reference to the 1988 massacre in this year’s resolution.
Lastly, I urge our Government to support Madam Rajavi’s call to end executions and endorse her ten-point plan for Iran’s future—a plan that offers a permanent solution and viable democratic alternative to end the regime’s state repression, terrorism and executions in Iran.
In 1986 and 2005 I argued that the UK was standing on the wrong side of history. As the deadly quartet of Iran, North Korea, China and Russia – with their proxy allies in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis – threaten the peace of the world can anyone now doubt that the present – let alone history – demands more concerted and committed support for those who bravely and consistently seek fundamental change from within.
Thank you.
