Iran: Demonstrations

Lord Polak Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Polak (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my local bishop, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, for obtaining this important debate. I wish the new Minister well on his debut.

It is often said that fact is stranger than fiction. To follow the right reverend Prelate’s words, it is hard to believe that on 25 March 2022 Iran began a four-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women, the UN’s top women’s rights body. I want to go one stage further than the right reverend Prelate. Commending the women for their bravery and courage is absolutely right, but it is just words. Talk is not enough, so let us act—and I think we can act. Can the Minister advise me on whether the UK can take a lead at the UN and ensure that Iran is immediately suspended and removed as a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women? It is impossible to understand how it can be on it. I urge the Minister to take that to the department. Let us lead—and this we can do.

In this Chamber, I have been consistently critical of the Iranian regime and have called for the proscription of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps several times. The US State Department designated the IRGC as a terrorist organisation in April 2019, adding it to a list of 67 other terrorist organisations, including Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which the UK has recently proscribed. This past July, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the other place named Hossein Taeb, a former head of intelligence in the IRGC, as part of a group of 10 Iranians who played a large role in the arrest and intimidation of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Despite this, the IRGC as an entity has been not been proscribed and Taeb has not been designated under our Magnitsky sanctions.

Furthermore, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has accused Iran of supplying Russia with weapons to help Putin’s illegal war effort against Ukraine. US reports have suggested that Iranian trainers from the IRGC have been deployed to a base in Crimea to teach Russian personnel how to operate the systems.

Last week, the Iranian Foreign Ministry announced a package of sanctions in retaliation for human rights sanctions that our Government imposed on Iran on 10 October. The Iranians singled out nine individuals in the UK who have been blacklisted—including myself. What an honour: banned from a country that attacks its own people, beating women and children because they dare to protest against backwards and oppressive laws. This is a country where peaceful protesters are dragged and beaten to death; a country that shuts down its own internet so the rest of the world cannot bear witness to the murderous brutality of the IRGC, while providing weapons and training to support Putin’s criminal acts in Ukraine. To be banned from such a country for standing up against its leadership, terrorist actions and treatment of its own people is indeed an honour.

I will continue to speak out against the Iranian regime and specifically its terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for their inhumane activity on the ground in Iran and their acts of terror internationally. I urge my new noble friend the Minister to persuade those who are shamefully blocking the proscription of the IRGC to take immediate action and designate them to proscribe the murderous Iranian revolutionary guard.