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Rouhani will face protests in Europe and for good reason

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Source: .lenouveleconomiste.fr*

By Alejo Vidal-Quadras

When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visits Italy and France this month, he can expect to be met with protests from many Iranian exiles, human rights advocates and members of parliaments.

Some European politicians have been eagerly pressing for an improvement of ties to Iran with the notion that Rouhani represents a moderate faction of the regime that ought to be supported. They hope the visit will boost relations and encourage Tehran to change its policies.

But until the day that Rouhani departs for home, I will maintain hope that the leadership in the European Union may recognize his visit as the opportunity that it could be: an occasion to formally address the myriad of valid and urgent complaints that are being raised by Iranians in exile and activists still living under the thumb of the mullahs, human rights advocates and the multitude of members of parliament and experts who argue that Rouhani must meet certain criteria before Iran can be considered a positive player in the world. Currently, this regime is a major obstacle for peace and security in Middle East.

Those complaints are not only general observations about the nature of the Iranian regime. They are also specific indictments of the Rouhani administration and its record of maintaining or even exacerbating the abuses that have been made familiar by all of his predecessors.

In Iran today, arbitrary arrests are commonplace, censorship is aggressive, and state-financed propaganda overrides much of the grassroots sentiment throughout the country. But if Europe were to simply acknowledge these repressive trends, it would see that the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) with a clear secular and democratic agenda and other dissidents surely speak for the Iranian people when it comes to the status of human rights, women’s rights and how to deal with the hard-line ideology in Tehran.

And it’s not as if the persistence of these abuses is unknown to us. If they are not addressed when Rouhani visits, it will be an act of convenient and deliberate omission, not a result of genuine ignorance. The United Nations has highlighted the human rights crisis in Iran a number of times since Rouhani’s election, with Ahmed Shaheed, the special rapporteur on the issue, noting that in many ways the situation has grown considerably worse under his tenure than it was even under his avowedly hard-line predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The latest statistics indicate that in 2015 alone, the Iranian judiciary executed more than 1,000 individuals. It also began 2016 with several mass executions, putting it well on track to maintaining its record as the nation with the highest per-capita rate of executions. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have also emphasized the fact that some of these executions have been of political prisoners, people who were denied due process, and people who were minors at the time of their offenses.

Through all of this, reports from inside Iran indicate that Rouhani has never spoken out against any of these atrocities. Quite the contrary, he has infamously justified them as enforcement of both “divine law” and the laws of a parliament that legitimately represents the Iranian people. Such commentaries make it quite obvious that Rouhani has no intention of speaking out against those laws, which allow for imprisonment and execution on the basis of violations of sharia law, repression against women, as well as other vaguely-defined offenses like “spreading propaganda” and “enmity against God.”

All of this is well reported, even if it is buried beneath a mountain of reports in Western media about warming relations and a “successful” nuclear agreement. Such an imbalance of reporting is by no means justification for neglect of Rouhani’s domestic record. It is time for European leaders to see the realities about Rouhani and more importantly address it publicly when he comes to Europe. This is good policy and in line with our values as Europeans.

Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a veteran Spanish politician and former Vice-President of the European Parliament (1999-2014), is currently the President of the International Committee In Search of Justice (ISJ), a Brussels-based NGO.

• Translated to English by NCR-Iran.org