Hundreds of members of the European Parliament have strongly condemned human rights violations by the Iranian government. According to Amnesty International, “Iran alone accounted for 55% of all recorded executions” in the world in 2016. They also called for the blacklisting of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) involved in multiple regional conflicts.
The list of 265 parliamentarians represents a wide array of political tendencies and groups and comes as popular resentment builds toward the ruling clerics’ political establishment in the context of a renewed focus on the 1988 massacre of thousands of political dissidents.
In a joint statement issued on Monday by Gérard Deprez, Chair of the Friends of a Free Iran in the European Parliament, the MEPs blasted Tehran for its abysmal human rights record, saying that the situation has worsened under Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani. During Rouhani’s first four years, the parliamentarians said, Iran had the highest number of executions per capita in the world, with a staggering nearly 3,000 hangings.
The MEPs in Brussels added Rouhani’s minister of justice is a self-confessed murderer who was a member of the Death Committee, ordering the execution of over 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, mostly from the main opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The parliamentarians issued a call for “the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Human Rights Council to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran.”
European governments must make ties to Iran contingent on a halt to executions and a “clear progress on human rights and women’s rights,” they said.