{"id":235079,"date":"2021-02-17T09:05:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T14:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/?p=235079"},"modified":"2023-02-01T05:11:55","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T04:11:55","slug":"instead-of-reaching-out-to-iranian-businesses-europe-should-punish-its-top-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/blog\/op-ed\/instead-of-reaching-out-to-iranian-businesses-europe-should-punish-its-top-officials\/","title":{"rendered":"Instead of Reaching Out to Iranian Businesses, Europe Should Punish Its Top Officials"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Iran-EU-business-17022021\"<\/p>\n

By Alejo Vidal Quadras<\/strong><\/p>\n

On March 1, European diplomats and business leaders will be joining virtually with their Iranian counterparts for a three-day conference to discuss the future of commercial opportunities and trade ties between the two regions. The event had previously been scheduled for December but was cancelled by its European organizers at the last moment, after Iran raised global outcry with the execution of an opposition journalist Ruhollah Zam<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now that it is back on, the event is expected to feature the same headliners, including the European Union\u2019s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Iranian regime Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif<\/a>. The latter\u2019s keynote speech is certain to raise the ire of some critics of the Iranian regime who recognize the country\u2019s top diplomat as a malign influence on global affairs who tends to receive an unjustifiably warm reception from his Western counterparts.<\/p>\n

A number of those critics recently signed their names to statements that urged the EU to reconsider its Iran policy and took explicit aim at Zarif. Although the Europe-Iran Business Forum is now linked to the Zam case and the underlying patter of Iranian human rights abuses, the statements in question were primarily motivated by something else: the Iranian regime\u2019s lifelong practice of using terrorism as a form of statecraft.<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the announcement of the Forum\u2019s new start date, that terrorism became even more visible to the international community than it typically is. Early this month, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat was convicted alongside three co-conspirators for the attempted bombing of an expatriate rally<\/a> where hundreds of first rank international dignitaries were preent that was being held just outside of Paris in the summer of 2018. The plot\u2019s mastermind, Assadollah Assadi<\/a>, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but the trial left related issues unresolved insofar as it revealed that he was at the head of a much larger network of operatives than he had used in the attempted bombing.<\/p>\n

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An Iranian diplomat convicted to 20 years imprisonment by a court in Belgium - February 2021<\/div><\/div>
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