NCRI – British lawmaker Steve McCabe has urged the United Kingdom government to press the United Nations to recognize Camp Liberty as a refugee camp. Camp Liberty houses thousands of members of Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI, or Mujahedin-e Khalgh, MEK)
“As a member of the UN Security Council, seriously we have got to demand that Camp Liberty be declared as a refugee camp and be put under UNHCR control,” Steve McCabe MP said at a conference on human rights in Iran at the Houses of Parliament on October 19.
Mr. McCabe said that claims that the Iranian regime’s President Hassan Rouhani is a moderate are a farce.
“Now we all know the truth about Mr. Rouhani. Of course, he is a moderate when posing with the western press. He’s a moderate when he’s posing with western leaders and when he is trying to get his hands on foreign currency and frozen assets. That’s when he’s a moderate. The rest of the time is a very different story.”
“It’s a country which violates the rights of women and children and persecutes religious minorities: Christians, Baha’is and Sunnis. That’s the reality of the country. It’s a country were the number of executions as we have already been hearing is on an upward trend year after year after year, and it’s a country where it is ok to execute juveniles.”
“It’s a country where Amnesty International has condemned them for the execution of children. It’s a country where the EU has pointed out that they are in breach of their international obligations as regards with the conventions of the Rights of the Child. So we need to be making it clear that we’re not going to tolerate that. We are not going to turn a blind eye to the things we know are going on there.”
So they execute children, they force drugs, they turn their prisoners into addicts as a way of suppressing them, and of course it’s not a country to be a journalist or a blogger or a netizen and it’s certainly not a country to be a lawyer.”
“So we should make it clear that a halt in the death penalty and humans rights should be a precondition for any thaw in economic relations with Iran, and that should be a precondition for the controlled release of any frozen funds. Otherwise, we are complicit in supporting butchers and savages and for one I am not going to do it.”