NCRI – Prominent Italian human rights personalities on Tuesday urged the major world powers not to ignore gross violations of human rights in Iran as they make an agreement with the mullahs’ regime over its nuclear weapons program.
An online panel consisting of Italian human rights experts Sergio D’Elia, Marco Perduca, Antonio Stango and Elisabetta Zamparutti discussed the human rights record of Hassan Rouhani two years since he took office as the regime’s president.
The panel took live questions from the media and human rights activists via Twitter.
Mr. Stango, President of the Italian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, pointed out that under Rouhani there have been more than 1,800 executions in Iran. He called for international recognition and support for the Iranian opposition led by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi.
The victims of the mullahs’ regime include political dissidents like Gholamreza Khosravi, an activist of Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI, or MEK) who was hanged last summer solely for providing financial assistance to a satellite television channel supporting the opposition. Other victims include Iranian women, juveniles and ethnic and religious minorities, the panel said.
Ms. Zamparutti, treasurer of the Italian NGO Hands Off Cane and a former Member of Parliament, said Iran is the number one executioner of prisoners in the world per capita, and is the biggest executioner of juvenile offenders.
Former Italian Senator Marco Perduca agreed, and said that the latest international agreement between the P5+1 states and the Iranian regime to curb Tehran’s nuclear weapons program should not distract from the abysmal human rights situation in the country.
Former lawmaker Sergio D’Elia, secretary of Hands Off Cane, said he would be delighted if the international nuclear accord announced earlier in the day genuinely led to the Tehran regime abandoning its nuclear weapons pursuit. However, he added, if in the end the regime violated its commitments ‘for the 1000th time’, it would lead to a greater conflict between the mullahs and the international community.
The panel highlighted the October 2014 execution of Rayhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old woman whose only crime was having defended herself against an intelligence agent who had attempted to rape her. Amnesty International called the execution “another bloody stain on Iran’s human rights record.”
The panel pointed out that a lack of international pressure on the mullahs’ regime over its atrocious human rights record had emboldened the regime to massacre its opponents with greater impunity. Attention was particularly drawn to the case of thousands of PMOI (MEK) members who have faced repeated deadly attacks in Camp Liberty (Iraq) by the Iranian regime’s terrorist proxies and are currently facing a medical and logistical siege by the Iraqi government at the behest of the mullahs’ regime in Iran.
The panel urged the international community to adopt a new principled policy on Iran, recognizing the PMOI (MEK) and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) as the democratic alternative to the mullahs’ fundamentalist rule in Iran.