Iran

Chris Law Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, and I thank the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith) for securing this debate today. His contribution to it was eloquent, insightful and detailed, which I appreciated.

The UK and Iran have had a long, complex and often difficult relationship, stretching back over several centuries, let alone decades. As the 17th largest country in the world both by size and population, which is located at a strategic intersection between the Arab, Turkish, Russian and Indian worlds, Iran as a nation has always had significant influence beyond its borders, both regionally and throughout the wider world.

For the past 44 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has operated a regime of oppression, internally and externally. As that oppression continues and even escalates, it is important that the UK Government proactively challenge the threat that Iran poses to universal human rights, as well as to regional and global stability. I begin my contribution today by stating that the Scottish National party stands in full solidarity with Iranian women, men and young people calling for democratic change. The bravery of Iranian citizens who stand up against brutality and dictatorship is beyond inspiring, and we in the SNP echo their rallying cry of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi”— “Women, Life, Freedom”.

Last year, Iran catapulted to the top of international news cycles when mass anti-Government protests rocked the country. The springboard for the recent attention on Iran was the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian regime. Detained by Iran’s notorious “morality police” for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely, she was beaten and tortured, which led to her falling into a coma in police custody and later dying in hospital. This was state-sanctioned femicide of a young Kurdish woman. Her brutal murder, carried out by the Iranian regime, sparked outrage and protest across Iran, resulting in the largest anti-Government protest movement in the country in years.

Tragically, the Iranian state has responded in a predictably vicious fashion. Iranian forces have been targeting women at anti-regime protests with shotgun fire to their faces, breasts and genitals, according to interviews with medics across the country. Just like the femicide of Mahsa Amini, which sparked the protests, these attacks could not be more gendered.

Over 500 people were killed during the protests, including 16-year-old Nika Shakarami, who was videoed while standing on and burning a headscarf as part of an anti-Government protest. She subsequently disappeared, having been chased by the police, and was eventually located in a mortuary 10 days after she went missing.

At least 19,000 protesters were detained, with the first death sentence imposed on one of them by an Iranian court coming in November 2022. The UN’s independent international fact-finding mission to Iran has cited reports of unfair proceedings and said that some of those who have been executed had been subject to torture or other forms of mistreatment. This year, conservative estimates suggest that Iran has executed 209 people, mostly for drug offences, although that number is probably far lower than the reality. Many of those executions have been public hangings using cranes. Indeed, some people have been punished by the removal of limbs or by being blinded.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said:

“The weaponisation of criminal procedures to punish people for exercising their basic rights—such as those participating in or organising demonstrations—amounts to state sanctioned killing.”

Sadly, those violent and appalling tactics are nothing new in Iran, and they have been in the oppression arsenal of the Iranian regime, security forces and police for many decades. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded on murder and terror in 1979, and murder and terror have been used ever since to keep the regime and its barbaric leadership in place. In the five years following the revolution, up to 10,000 opponents of the new regime were executed, and in 1988, on the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini, thousands—probably tens of thousands—of political prisoners were executed without trial.

Protests are quelled through violence, murder and arrest, as happened during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests and the 2019 Mahshahr massacre. Every day, the regime inflicts on its citizens arbitrary detention and killing, torture, denial of freedom of assembly and expression, gender-based violence, and discrimination against and persecution of minorities.

The Iranian regime and its security apparatus commit grave human rights violations daily, and that is not simply limited to the territory of Iran, because the wider Iranian regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps contribute to alarming security and human rights violations around the world, which every speaker in the debate has mentioned.

The preamble to the constitution of the Islamic Republic states that

“the Constitution provides the… basis for… the continuation of the Revolution at home and abroad.”

Iran has ambitions to be the dominant regional force in the middle east, and since the 1980s it has provided support for the Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon and the Assad regime in Syria. In recent decades, Iran has supported Shi’a militias in Iraq, especially following the 2003 US-led invasion, and has backed a Houthi group in the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The regime also has a history of providing missiles to Hamas in the Gaza strip.

Iran’s flagrant disregard for international law is also evident in its behaviour far beyond the region and its neighbours. As set out last year by Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Iran’s aggressive intelligence services are a direct threat to people in the UK, and the Metropolitan police have reported 15 foiled plots since the start of last year either to kidnap or to kill UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the Iranian regime.

In February, independent television network Iran International—one of the most prominent providers of news from the recent wave of anti-Government protests in Iran—suspended its operations in the UK because of threats against its London-based journalists. Two British-Iranian journalists from the channel were warned by police of a possible risk to their lives, with the TV network stating that it had made the decision owing to

“a significant escalation in state-backed threats from Iran”.

The threats had grown to the point at which it was no longer thought possible to protect the channel’s staff. This is here in the UK, but still we have not yet proscribed.

Not only do the UK Government have a responsibility to ensure the safety of those living in the UK who are targeted by the Iranian regime; they must protect UK-Iranian dual nationals in Iran, and it is deeply worrying that the FCDO continues to fail those nationals who have been arbitrarily detained there. The shameful execution of Alireza Akbari in January should serve as an urgent wake-up call to the FCDO on the callous barbarism of the Iranian regime and the serious injustice and failings of the Iranian judicial system. The FCDO needs to do better to protect UK nationals.

In December, Iranian state media reported that seven people with links to the UK, including some with dual nationality, had been arrested for involvement in protests. The FCDO must urgently provide an update on the whereabouts and wellbeing of those individuals, as well as an update on the efforts being made to secure their release.

Dual UK-Iranian nationals Morad Tahbaz and Mehran Raoof remain in arbitrary detention in Iran, and they have long been used as political tools by the Iranian regime. Their safe release and full pardon should be at the forefront of the FCDO’s work. We are well aware of the treatment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Anoosheh Ashoori and other dual UK-Iranian nationals detained, and even tortured, in Iranian prisons.

The FCDO cannot make the same mistakes with currently detained dual nationals that it has made in the past. Given the significant and continued human rights abuses, and the security threat posed by the Iranian regime, both inside and outside Iran, the UK Government must take bold action, and action now, to safeguard Iranians globally and send a strong message against the regime’s tyranny. Just as the UK Government have done with the Russian Wagner Group, the SNP calls on the Government to formally proscribe, without hesitation, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation. The SNP wholeheartedly welcomes reports that the UK is set to formally proscribe the Russian mercenary Wagner Group as a terrorist organisation. Alongside that move, the time has come for the UK Government to finally proscribe the IRGC not only because it is in the national interest, but because it is morally the right thing to do, and there is unanimity in this Chamber for it. We have to do it in solidarity with those facing daily repression at the hands of the Iranian regime and in honour of the tens of thousands who have lost their lives to that group since 1979. We know the IRGC is operating on UK soil and is violating human rights on a daily basis in Iran. The United States formally proscribed it in 2019, and it is now time that the UK follows suit.

While the SNP welcomes the UK sanctioning of top Iranian security officials since the beginning of the regime’s clampdown on protesters in 2022, we call on the FCDO to consider sanctioning the highest echelons of Iranian political society, including the supreme leader, given the inexcusable continuation of state-sponsored violence and killings.