Members of the Anglo-Iranian communities and supporters of the Iranian Resistance urged world leaders to stand with the Iranian people and take immediate action to stop impunity for crimes against humanity and genocide in Iran, during a rally organised simultaneously with the COP26 summit in Glasgow on Monday, 1 November 2021.
The rally highlighted the regime’s systematic destruction of Iran’s environment and persecution of environmentalists as enemies of the state.
Participants also marked the second anniversary of the November 2019 uprising in Iran and honoured the 1500 protesters who were killed when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and security forces opened fire at the popular protests across the country following a direct order by the regime’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
They highlighted the involvement of the regime’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in the 2019 deadly crackdown and the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners which prominent lawyers describe as a crime against humanity and genocide.
The Scottish politician and MEP until 2014, and the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC), Struan Stevenson, described the humiliating climbdown of Raisi, who has decide not to come to Glasgow, as a great victory for the Iranian people and said:
“It is simply a joke that the mullahs’ regime should pretend that they have the slightest interest in COP26. The regime’s rank incompetence, venal corruption and voracious profiteering have increased the risk and the incidence of natural disasters in Iran.
“Raisi is the zombie president of a dying regime. He realised that, unlike his predecessors, he is unable to travel freely to the West, or indeed to any civilised nation, due to his pariah status as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’. He knows they are investigating the hundreds of executions that took place while he was head of the judiciary, executions that are accelerating now that he has become president.
“He knows that even as a serving president, following his sham election in June, he cannot rely on diplomatic immunity to avoid arrest. He knows he could still be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and charged with crimes against humanity, torture, murder and genocide. There is a cell waiting for Ebrahim Raisi at the ICC in the Hague.”
Hossein Abedini, Deputy director of the UK Representative Office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) summarised the participants’ demands in his remarks and said:
“Our message today to the world leaders attending the COP26 Summit is clear and simple. It is time to stand with the Iranian people and their organised Resistance for a free and democratic Iran.
“It is time to join the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance in rejecting the regime in Iran in its entirety and support the popular campaign of bringing to justice and prosecution the regime’s mass murderer president Ebrahim Raisi, and the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, for decades of serious human rights abuses, crime against humanity and genocide.”
Raisi had planned to attend the COP26 summit as his first foreign visit as president. However, he canceled the visit after a group of former political prisoners, survivors, and families of the victims of the 1988 massacre filed a legal complaint against him in the UK and Scotland under the UK’s universal jurisdiction legislation requesting his arrest for crimes against humanity and genocide if he attended the COP26 Summit in Glasgow.
National Council of Resistance of Iran – UK Representative Office
November 1, 2021