The United States government must not turn a blind eye on ‘abysmal’ human rights abuses by the Iranian regime in their attempt to strike a nuclear agreement, Prof. David Alton, a member of the United Kingdom House of Lords, has said.
Writing for PoliticsHome.com on Tuesday, Lord Alton of Liverpool said: “The Obama administration seems to believe that any nuclear agreement – whatever it is – will promote greater understanding between Iran and the United States and thus increase Western influence in the Islamic country. But the facts suggest otherwise.”
“A weak nuclear agreement threatens to legitimise virtually all of the activities of a regime whose ‘moderate’ elements are insignificantly different from its hardliners. This will almost certainly increase its hold on Iranian society and set back the cause of human rights.”
Lord Alton added: “On June 13th, in a speech to her supporters, at a major rally attended by more than 100,000 people, Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), characterised the situation in this way: ‘Unfortunately, Western governments, the United States in particular, violated UN Security Council resolutions and offered major concessions, propelling the regime closer to the Bomb.’ Many other critics agree, and of course their concerns about a weak nuclear deal with Iran are well founded.”
“Because a certain segment of the Iranian government has simply remained at the negotiating table – all the while raising its demands and keeping progress very slow – the Obama administration has apparently convinced itself that the regime is on the course to moderation. But this is delusional, and one look at the behaviour of the regime should make that clear,” he said.
“During the first year of the presidency of supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani, the rate of executions in Iran reached its highest level in a decade. This in a country that already had the highest rate per capita in the entire world. The current pace of hangings is on track to push the figure over 1,000 for the year: repeat, 1000 executions in 2015.”
“The Iranian parliament’s ‘plan to promote virtue and prevent vice’ has been blamed for a series of acid attacks on women; the worsening aggression toward journalists is reflected in the targeting of Westerners such as Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian; and in one recent incident an Iranian police officer stopped a dog-walker on the street in Tehran and shot his beloved pet in the head. Dissenters, non-believers, and minorities fare little better. Human rights and human dignity are routinely trampled on.”
The cause of human rights in Iran, Lord Alton argued, “can only be advanced by standing up to the regime and by re-coupling the nuclear and human rights issues that the Obama administration has specifically separated within its Iran policy.”
Lord Alton urged the West to heed the warning of Mrs Maryam Rajavi who in her June 13 speech explained that all of the problems associated with Iran today are ‘interconnected’, and ‘all of them go to the very heart of the regime’:
“The only way to end the violations of human rights in Iran, the nuclear impasse, the crises in the region, and the confrontation with ISIS and terrorism is to topple the Caliph of regression and terrorism in Iran.”
Professor Lord Alton of Liverpool is a cross-bench member of the House of Lords and a leading member of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom.
