Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

MEK, UK House of Commons Discuss Tehran Regime Violations | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Media ID: 55362414
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London- Meeting at the UK House of Commons with British high-end political figures, Iranian opposition and activist movement People’s Mujahedin of Iran, otherwise known as MEK, discussed the worsening case of human rights in Iran, especially post the 2015 nuclear deal. Two hundred British MPs and peers call for independent investigation into Iran’s 1988 massacre.

At the conference that was chaired by Rt Revd John Pritchard, former Bishop of Oxford, on Thursday, cross party MPs, Lords and British religious leaders expressed their serious concerns over the alarming rate of executions in Iran, including public hangings and execution of juvenile offender and women.

“The conference is of extreme political importance, as it sheds light on the Maryam Rajavi’s Ten Point Plan to free Iran,” Member of the Parliament in exile of the Iranian resistance (NCRI) Hossein Abedini told Asharq Al-Awsat.

Maryam Rajavi is the President of the MEK, an organization trying to overthrow the Iranian theocratic regime.

The MEK had urged the UK government to recognize the 1988 executions of political prisoners in Iran as a crime against humanity—next to the legal pursuit of Iran members involved in the deaths and who currently hold senior posts in the Hassan Rouhani administration.

In the summer of 1988, based on a fatwa decreed by the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini, some 30,000 political prisoners were massacred in the space of a few months and buried secretly in mass graves. The officials responsible for the massacre currently hold some of the highest positions in the regime.

Abedini expressed his growing optimism that the MEK will one day put off all Iran regime violations against human rights and holding the cleric-led power accountable.

“It will one day overcome the regime’s savage approach and terror-inclined behavior, which will cut down tensions and chances of regional war outbreak,” Abedini added.

Panelists welcomed the adopted resolution on human rights in Iran by the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee on November 15, applauding remarks by Ambassador Martin Shearman of the UK Mission to the United Nations that “it remains crucial that we keep a focus on human rights and continue to hold the Iranian government to account for its human rights record.”

Panelists concurred with Rajavi in condemning the Iranian regime’s restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and religion, its violent crackdown on popular protests, suppression of women and youths as well as the institutionalized discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities, especially the Christians and Baha’is.