Iran Focus
London, 27 Jul – Iran’s main opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), has criticised the upcoming trip to Tehran of European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.
Mogherini will travel to Tehran on Tuesday following the major power powers’ recent nuclear deal with Iran. It will be her first official visit to Tehran, where she is expected to meet Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif and other senior officials.
The Foreign Affairs Committee of the NCRI in a statement said “the upcoming trip to Iran by Ms. Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and meetings with leaders of the ruling religious fascism encourage this regime to continue torture and executions”.
It urged “all supporters of human rights, women’s rights and democracy to take urgent action for the cancellation of this trip”.
“This and other trips to Iran under the mullahs’ rule run counter to the national interest of the Iranian people and their determination to overthrow this regime and establish democracy and popular rule in Iran”.
“Ms. Mogherini plans to meet with those responsible for 120,000 political executions and the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988”, it said.
Amnesty International in a press release on Thursday said that at least 694 prisoners were executed in Iran in the first half of 2015.
“Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale. … We are likely to see more than 1,000 state-sanctioned deaths by the year’s end”, the international human rights group said.
The NCRI statement added: “Ms. Mogherini will be meeting in Tehran with those bearing chief responsibility for the export of terrorism and fundamentalism and the massacre of the innocent peoples of Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. These officials should be tried for crimes against humanity for their crimes both inside Iran and abroad”.
“In the nine months that Ms. Mogherini has taken the helm in Schuman Square, some 1,000 prisoners have been executed in Iran, women have faced the most severe pressures, and religious and ethnic minorities have faced extensive repression and discrimination; however, Ms. Mogherini has refrained from uttering even a verbal condemnation of these daily atrocities. This is disgraceful for the European Union whose very foundation is based on countering fascism and supporting democracy and human rights”.
“While every day hundreds of Iranian women are arrested, fined and flogged by the agents of the regime on the bogus charge of ‘mal-veiling’, Ms. Mogherini plans to please the mullahs and obey their instructions by wearing a veil in her meetings with human rights criminals such as Hassan Rouhani, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, Javad Zarif and Ali Larijani. Ms. Mogherini’s action is a blatant insult to all Iranian women”.
The NCRI Foreign Affairs Committee “strongly condemned” the upcoming trip of the EU’s top diplomat and urged Mogherini “not to put salt on the Iranian people’s wounds, even if she refuses to doing anything to ease their pain and suffering”.
