Baroness O’Loan: There Will Be a Day When Iran Will Have Freedom

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Staff Writer

Baroness Nuala O’Loan, speaking at the UK Parliament on September 12, emphasized the dire situation in Iran and highlighted the regime’s brutality, exemplified by the tragic death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the regime’s morality police, arrested for not wearing her hijab properly.

Baroness O’Loan expressed deep respect for the courage of Iranian youth who defy repression and highlighted the ongoing human rights abuses and judicial executions in Iran. She commended Iranians worldwide for their efforts to expose the regime’s atrocities and contrasted their dignity with the IRGC’s methods.

Baroness O’Loan called for accountability, urging the UK to support establishing an international investigative mechanism and prosecute Iranian officials for crimes under international law. She stressed the need to proscribe the IRGC and affirmed Iran’s deserving of freedom and democracy.

The text of Baroness Nuala O’Loan’s speech follows:

 

Well, first of all, I would like to thank those who organized today and who gave us as British parliamentarians the opportunity to speak again on the terrible, terrible situation in Iran. And I welcome the opportunity, too, to pay another tribute to Madame Rajavi, whose leadership, whose courage, whose dignity is unparalleled, I think, and it was very good to hear her speak again and to hear her speak of the fact that the announcements by the Iranian regime are not to be believed, that there will be a day when Iran will have freedom.

As I come into parliament in the morning, I often check for what’s happening across the world in areas in which I’m interested, and again this morning I found the reports of arrests and detention of people out of the blue, people who disappear when they’re arrested or who die. This all started, it didn’t all start, but last year and this year we are marking the death of Mahsa Amini. She was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly.

It’s important to remember that, the extent to which the regime will go. We don’t know what she suffered while she was in custody, but she died as a consequence of what happened. Nobody believes that her death was caused by a heart attack alone. Had she not been arrested that day, she could very well be alive now.

I have some experience of violent street scenes because I come from Northern Ireland, I have been bombed, and I have experienced these kinds of things that we’ve watched here, but nothing, nothing on the scale of what is happening in Iran today. And I know how frightening it is to go onto the streets when you know that something is happening when you know that these protests are underway, and for these young people who do go out, knowing that they may be arrested, killed, gassed, all those things, I think we must have huge respect for the courage that they have.

I watch it with awe as these young people come out, against the repression, against the atrocities, against the terror, against the disappearances. In every conflict, there will be those who just disappear, whose loved ones will search for them for decades, and who will never know what happened to them.

This is happening in Iran too. That total lack of recognition of and protection of human rights is absolutely terrible, and that includes the so-called judicial executions that have taken place on such a regular basis, but also the young people who are pushed off buildings, the young people who just die because their voice is not acceptable to the regime.

So, I think it’s important today to acknowledge and to pay tribute to the courage of those, both men and women, who go onto the streets and onto social media to get the message out, to protest, to tell about the savagery and the inhumanity of the current Iranian regime.

And I’d like to pay tribute too at this moment to all those Iranians who are working across the world to make sure that the truth is told. Today, their dignity, their strength, their determination, and their respect for the rule of law, their desire for a free Iran, are so much to be commended. The way in which they go about the work they do is such a contrast to the way in which the IRGC goes about their work.

Our chair spoke today of the need for the families of victims to be able to bring the perpetrators of those atrocities to justice. There are calls for the United Kingdom to take action to help end the crisis of systemic impunity in Iran, to support calls for the UN Human Rights Council to urgently establish an international investigative and accountability mechanism to collect, consolidate, preserve, and analyze evidence of the most serious crimes under international law which are being committed in Iran today, including responsibility for the death of Masha Amini in custody.

And we should, as a country, we should commit to exercising universal jurisdiction to criminally investigate and prosecute Iranian officials suspected of criminal responsibility for crimes under international law. We must do more. The IRGC must be prescribed. It’s not a question of should, it’s not a question of should we think about it. They must be prescribed. Iran deserves freedom. Her people must have that democratic, secular republic of which Madam Rajavi spoke, which will enable Iran to take its place in the modern world and her people to flourish in freedom.

Thank you.

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