Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on May 30th, 2013

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Six hundred and eighty-six apparently was the number of candidates that tried to qualify for the elections. Only eight were chosen. I understand some of the 686 were actually insiders before. Can you give us your interpretation about what's possibly going on inside the regime with this outcome?

[Mark Dubowitz]

I think what's happening is that the supreme leader looked at the election of 2009 and realized that he had lost control. He had lost control of somebody that he had considered to be a loyalist. But what he had was a populist. He had a former mayor of Tehran who understood grass roots election politics and got too big for his boots and gave the supreme leader and the IRGC, Soleimani, Jafari, and this clerical military dictatorship some real heartburn over the past few years, in challenging the regime and appealing over their heads to the Iranian people.

So this time around, Khamenei took no chances. He would not let Rafsanjani run because he feared him as a power centre. He would not let Ahmadinejad's father-in-law and chief of staff Mashaei run, because he was too close to Ahmadinejad. So they whittled down that list as you said to eight persons, all of whom have impeccable revolutionary credentials. When you look at Jalili, who is reputed to be the front runner, he has made it very clear in his public statements over the past number of years, including the past number of weeks, that he shares Khamenei's view of the revolution, Iranian society, and of the rejection of the international community. He is a supreme loyalist.

When you look at Rezai and Velayati, these are two men who not only share the supreme leader's view of the revolution, but they have also been implicated by the Argentine prosecutor I mentioned, Alberto Nisman, for the 1994 attack against the AMIA centre in Buenos Aires. There are Interpol red notices that have been issued against these men. They're international fugitives who are running for the presidency.

So as you go down the list of the eight members who are running, Khamenei has ensured that none of the eight would be men that would challenge him, challenge Soleimani, challenge the Revolutionary Guards. In that sense, this election will be more fraudulent than the 2009 election. In that election they actually rigged votes to ensure that Ahmadinejad won; in this election, they've rigged the candidates so that no matter who wins, he will be a supreme loyalist.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Mr. Cotler.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

It's just a procedural thing. I did circulate a notice of motion and I believe there may be a consensus for it. I think it would be symbolically good if we could adopt it today. You may want to do this after the meeting or....

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

I'll just ask the question.

Have all members seen the notice?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

You'd have to actually move it, Mr. Cotler.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I move that the motion that has been circulated be adopted.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

All right. We'll see if there's unanimous consent, first of all.

Is there unanimous consent for the motion?

(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

All right.

We'll make sure that gets out.

Please go to your questions; we just don't want to waste any of the time we have here.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

My first question is for Mr. Dubowitz. I hope the government will adopt both of your suggestions regarding designating the IRGC as a human rights violator under SEMA and as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code.

Because you made the proper point about the importance of linking sanctions to human rights violations, my question is this. Are there other major entities or individuals looking at what the EU has done, and what the U.S. has recently done, that we should be looking to in order to maybe broaden our sanctioning of human rights violators here?

[Mark Dubowitz]

Mr. Cotler, it's actually a very timely question.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. Congress just unanimously adopted legislation last week called the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013. In the legislation there is a specific human rights provision that would require the administration to report back to Congress with a list of all Iranian officials who are implicated in human rights abuses, and then to give a 30-day or 60-day determination, after issuing that report, on the imposition of sanctions against the said individuals.

The premise is that this vast system of domestic repression, again, is headed up by one man, Ali Khamenei, but that there are many officials are involved, from IRGC commanders to prosecutors, judges, prison guards, members of the Basij, members of the Iranian Parliament. Really, as you go through the entire power apparatus of the Iranian regime, you find yourself able to map out a repressive apparatus of people who are actually specifically implicated in murder, torture, imprisonment. The legislation would actually call for the identification of these individuals, the sanctioning of them, the freezing of their assets, the denial of travel visas, and call on other countries to adhere to these travel bans.

I think it would be a very good idea for the Canadian government—which again, has really taken the lead on this human rights issue, more so than our government, more so than even the Europeans—to designate under SEMA the IRGC for human rights abuses, and also go after the specific individuals in that apparatus of repression that I've named, specifically identifying and sanctioning them individually, as well as the collective.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you. We will follow up on that.

Very quickly, if I may, I want to put a question to Matthew Levitt. Based on your research, I once wrote a piece about the Iranian-Hezbollah terrorist connection, which from 2011 up to the Burgas attack on July 18 spanned five continents, involving more than 25 countries.

I noticed, at least in my perspective, that it's receded since the attack on Burgas. Is that because of the Hezbollah involvement in Syria and its preoccupation there? Or has the nature and pattern of terrorist attacks inspired by Iran, carried out by Hezbollah, continued to cross continents and countries?

[Dr. Matthew Levitt]

It hasn't stopped in the least. We make a mistake when we sit and look at open sources of thinking that what gets reported publicly is what's happening. With covert organizations like Hezbollah and the Quds Force, there's a lot more happening than often gets reported. Whether it's suspicious surveillance or attempts that fail, Hezbollah surveillance at the airport in Johannesburg, from the Ukraine to Greece and Turkey, there are all kinds of things that continue on the Hezbollah side and on the Quds Force side.

Though I'm out of the intelligence community now, the people I speak to inform me that the nature of the threats from both Hezbollah and the Quds Force targeting civilians and diplomats respectively continue at a significant pace. In my book, for example, people won't be as surprised that there's more detail than most people know about regarding their activities in South America and North America, including Canada. But I think people would be surprised and I was surprised at how much information there was on Hezbollah in southeast Asia, in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Africa and the Middle East, beyond Europe and the other places where we've known they've operated for a long time.

If I could add just one last comment to the earlier question on the issue of the number of candidates who can run. Mark is absolutely right that from the supreme leader's perspective, you have a president who went rogue and wanted to control the candidates. An Iranian friend of mine told me that after the last election that what was new in 2009 wasn't that the election was stolen, but that it was so blatantly and obviously and openly stolen. What he predicted then, and what is actually happening, is that the regime would just go back to using its institutional means of control to control the election in a much quieter way. That is what we're seeing and there's no surprise in that whatsoever. It's still an abuse of human rights; it's just not as obvious and therefore doesn't create as much anger and reaction both at home and abroad.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

We have to move now to our next questioner. That's Mr. Schellenberger.

[Gary Schellenberger, Perth—Wellington, CPC]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for your testimony here today.

In order to improve the human rights situation in Iran, is it preferable to engage the Iranian government or authorities to support civil society or both? In other words, what is the most likely avenue for reform within Iran?

[Dr. Matthew Levitt]

Well, if you believe that this regime in Iran is reformable then I suppose that engaging with them makes a lot of logical sense. I don't believe that's the case. I believe this government in Iran is organized in such a way as to be repressive, to control who gets to run. I believe that to call the Iranian government a democratic government is a farce of democracy. It's not real democracy: you don't get to choose whom you're going to vote for, you don't get to choose who gets to run. An unelected element gets to choose that.

There are two governments in Iran. One is the pseudo-elected, and it basically doesn't have any real power anyway. The other is revolutionary, which isn't elected in the least and controls all of the elements of governmental power, from the media and judiciary to the military and intelligence and more. I don't believe that engagement with Iran has any chance of leading to civil society reform.

Now that doesn't mean there isn't a role for engagement, but I don't think it's with the government. There are civil society activists in Iran. Unfortunately, we can't openly meet with them in Iran. It would not be good for them. That's why we're sitting here today. But you can meet with them elsewhere. You have to do it quietly so as not to put them and their families in danger.

But there is a need to engage with, support, and find ways to back up those who are trying to build a civil society in Iran. I just don't believe that the government has any role in that whatsoever, other than trying to suppress exactly that type of activity.

[Mark Dubowitz]

I'll just add that one great example was the global dialogue conference in Toronto two weeks ago, which I believe was sponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Munk School of Global Affairs. Iranian-Canadian civil society activists were brought to Toronto with their colleagues from Europe and were actually using technology so that 150,000 Iranians in Iran were able to view the conference and ask specific questions and provide comments via social media. I was there and thought it was a great example of how you can actually do what Matt is suggesting, namely engaging with Iranian civil society.

I would agree with Matt. I think the only engagement that is worth doing is not engagement with a regime on questions of democracy and human rights. The only engagement worth doing, to some extent, is on their nuclear program. I support a diplomatic track. The five rounds of discussions we've had so far with the Iranian regime on their nuclear program failed. It's fine to talk to them about their nuclear program. It's certainly more than fine to be imposing specific sanctions—counter proliferation sanctions, economic sanctions, and human rights sanctions—on the regime while you're doing that, because clearly this is a regime whose calculus you will not change unless you impose significant pressure to break the nuclear will of Ali Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guards.

But there is no point in engaging with the regime on questions of civil society. Having said that, again, I think Canada takes the lead in engaging with civil society participants in ways that you did two weeks ago at the University of Toronto.

[Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Iran was the chair of the UN disarmament conference. How badly is the UN's reputation compromised when Iran is in leadership positions within it?

[Mark Dubowitz]

You know, sir, it's even worse than that. That just sounds like a bad sitcom, but it actually is worse. The United Nations has been so penetrated by Iranian largesse, and the strange voting patterns and voting blocks of the UN, that the Iranians have not only chaired the disarmament conference, but I believe they've also chaired conferences on women's rights. They have a board seat at the UN's flagship agency, the United Nations Development Programme—the UNDP, I believe is the acronym—which doles out literally hundreds of millions of dollars every year around the world. Iran sits on its board of directors and makes decisions about where that money goes. Clearly, money buys it influence.

There's a litany of examples of how the United Nations has departed from its founding principles—which actually a great Canadian articulated at its origin. We see that the Iranians manipulate the institutions and the processes of the UN and get control of key agencies, and more importantly, of hundreds of millions of dollars of Canadian and U.S. taxpayer money to dole it out for their own purposes.

[Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you, Mr. Schellenberg.

Mr. Gravelle, the floor is yours.

[Claude Gravelle, NDP, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Dubowitz, your organization, through its Iranian human rights projects, keeps track of international companies that sell equipment and technology to Iran, material that is used by the regime for human rights abuses. Would you be able to provide the subcommittee with the names of some of these companies, in particular any European or North American ones, as well as discuss the types of human rights abuses that they implicate?

[Mark Dubowitz]

Thank you for that question.

You're absolutely right. There has actually been some excellent reporting done by The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Bloomberg, in open sources over the past couple of years detailing international companies that are selling tools of electronic repression to the Iranian regime. I would be delighted to provide you with a detailed, well-footnoted report that we have. We haven't publicly released it yet, but we would certainly provide it to the committee. It contains specific names, dates, and technologies that have been transferred.

I would also underscore that there is an opportunity to complement what Canada did yesterday. Canada yesterday essentially imposed a trade embargo on Iran, but provided specific exceptions for technology that would help Iranians challenge what President Obama has called Iran's electronic curtain. That is the positive side of technology—our ability to provide technology to the Iranian people to help them circumvent this electronic repression.

The other side of it is for Canada, under SEMA, to specifically sanction any Canadian person involved in providing tools of repression—electronic tools of repression—to the Iranian regime. Canada has a robust software and telecom industry, including in this town, and it's absolutely imperative that these sophisticated tracking and targeting technologies sold by western companies for police-enforcement purposes to reputable police forces around the world—which are subject to due process, warrants, and checks and balances—not be sold to the Iranian regime. Selling it to any element of that regime means that the regime will use that technology to specifically target dissidents for murder, torture, and unjust imprisonment.

So, absolutely, I will follow up and send you a very detailed report naming the exact companies involved in this.