The Jerusalem Post published an article by Irwin Cotler headlined "Rouhani is no ‘moderate’ when it comes to human rights."
"The Canadian Parliament has just concluded its third Iran Accountability Week, which sounded the alarm on the fourfold threat posed by the Iranian regime – nuclear, terrorist, incitement, and – in particular – the widespread and systematic violations of the human rights of the Iranian people. Parliamentarians heard from expert witness testimony on the Iranian threat – particularly the massive domestic repression – while a centerpiece of Iran Accountability Week was the Global Iranian Political Prisoner Advocacy Project, wherein parliamentarians “adopted” an Iranian political prisoner, not unlike the experience with taking up the case and cause of Soviet political prisoners,"the article begins.
"Yet, as nuclear talks resume this week, the systematic and widespread violations of human rights in Iran are being overshadowed – if not sanitized – by the preemptive international focus on the nuclear issue," the author notes.
"It should be recalled that when the US negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union in 1975, it did not turn a blind eye to the USSR’s human rights abuses. Instead, the Helsinki Final Act linked the security, economic and human rights “baskets,” with human rights emerging as the most transformative of the three. Negotiations with Iran should replicate this approach," the author of the article underlines.
"Accordingly, the ongoing nuclear negotiations should neither distract nor deflect from addressing and redressing the Iranian regime’s massive domestic repression," the author believes.
