Mr. Chair and honourable committee members, thank you for the invitation. It's a privilege for me to appear before you once again. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation for your continued attention to the human rights situation in Iran.
Exactly 50 years ago, in May 1968, the first international conference on human rights adopted the Tehran Proclamation, recognizing that civil and political rights and economic and social rights are indivisible.
A decade later, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution promised freedom and prosperity for the poor and the dispossessed. It promised the religious masses social justice and an end to corruption. This is an important point of departure in understanding the far-reaching significance for democratization and human rights of the widespread protests across Iran, beginning on December 28 of last year. The thousands who poured onto the streets of villages and towns and cities across the country are the same impoverished masses that the Islamic Republic claims to have liberated from tyranny.
The July 2015 nuclear deal, concluded in Vienna, lifted crippling sanctions against Iran. The World Bank observed that shortly after, the economy bounced back sharply with a growth rate of 9.2% by the second quarter of 2016. President Rouhani promised that this would lead to greater prosperity and freedom. That promise has not materialized. It isn't difficult to understand why.
Iran's oil wealth has vanished, in part, because of extreme corruption among Iranian elites. In its 2017 corruption index, Transparency International ranked Iran 130th among nations. The economy is controlled by the Revolutionary Guards and the religious foundations, a fusion of autocratic violence and theocratic extremism sustained by a kleptocratic class. Much of that money is laundered in real estate markets in Toronto and Vancouver. The committee may recall the $2.6-billion embezzlement scandal involving Mr. Mahmoud Khavari in 2011, who obtained Canadian citizenship while serving as the CEO of Melli Bank in Iran. There are many others like him.
Iran's oil wealth has also vanished because of costly proxy wars aimed at exporting the revolution and the destruction of Israel. Iran's Quds Force and Lebanon's Hezbollah have played a direct military role in supporting the Assad regime. They have contributed to civilian atrocities that the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria has qualified as crimes against humanity.
Elsewhere, Iraqi Shia militia have committed atrocities against Sunni civilians. In January, 2016 the Revolutionary Guards commander, Mohammad Jafari, celebrated the mobilization of nearly 200,000 armed youth across the region. All of this has cost Iran billions of dollars. Thus, while Iran's oil wealth sustains extravagant lifestyles and religious wars, Iranian youth suffer from an unemployment rate of 30%, according to World Bank statistics.
A prominent Iranian economist estimates that at least 26 million Iranians, or 33% of the population, live below the poverty line, and that 6%, or five million people, face starvation amidst rising prices, persistent unemployment, embezzlement, unpaid wages, bank collapses, and widening wealth disparity.
A noted expert has referred to the death spiral of the Iranian economy. This is the catastrophic toll of an authoritarian system without either transparency or accountability.
The situation is no longer sustainable. By way of example, on February 4 of this year, 3,500 steel workers in the city of Ahvaz went on strike to demand three months of unpaid salaries. On the same day, in the nearby city of Shush, a prominent labour activist demanded four months of unpaid salaries for 5,000 sugarcane workers. Where in the world, he asked, have you seen workers not being paid their miserable wages and then being forced, through police violence, to work? This is slavery.
This dire economic situation is exacerbated by severe climate change. The UN Development Programme warned in 2017 that, “Water shortages are acute; agricultural livelihoods no longer sufficient. With few other options, many people have left, choosing uncertain futures as migrants in search of work”.
In January of this year, Iranian authorities killed farmers protesting mismanagement of water resources in villages around Isfahan. Many environmentalists have been imprisoned on vague grounds of national security. A particularly disturbing case that you referred to, Mr. Chair, is that of Iranian Canadian Professor Kavous Seyed-Emami, founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation. He was arrested on baseless charges of spying for Israel and the United States. On February 9, his wife, Maryam Mombeini, was informed that her husband had committed suicide in Tehran's Evin prison.
The family was pressured to keep quiet and to bury the body quickly. A request for an independent autopsy was denied. It calls to mind the notorious murder of Zahra Kazemi in the same Evin prison in 2003. On March 8, his wife was detained at Tehran airport and denied the right to leave for Canada together with her two sons. This is how the Iranian regime deals with a grieving widow.
Iran's dysfunctional judiciary has been at the forefront of punishing the innocent while rewarding the guilty. Iran's execution binge continues unabated. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center has compiled a list of at least 524 executions in 2017, mostly public hangings, including death sentences against juveniles. Numerous dissidents continue to be imprisoned and tortured solely because of their religious or political beliefs. Even senior Islamic clerics such as Ayatollah Boroujerdi who calls for the separation of state and religion are silenced and persecuted.
Meanwhile, a culture of impunity prevails for the leadership's many crimes. Just yesterday, on April 30, a report by Amnesty International and Justice for Iran produced new evidence including satellite imagery, and photo and video analysis, demonstrating that the Islamic Republic has deliberately and systematically destroyed mass grave sites where at least 5,000 leftist political prisoners were secretly buried following Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa for their mass execution in 1988.
The members of the so-called “death commissions” that sent them to the gallows included Mostafa Pourmohammadi. In 2013, he was appointed minister of justice by President Rouhani. It also included Ebrahim Raisi who was appointed attorney general between 2014 and 2016.
He is now custodian of the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, probably the wealthiest religious foundation, with an estimated $15 billion worth of assets. That is how the regime rewards those who commit crimes against humanity.
The Iranian leadership is on a collision course with the Iranian people. Instead of addressing their legitimate grievances, the regime is responding to increasing public anger with increasing violence. In this regard, the policies of so-called reformists and hardliners are not fundamentally different. In the words of a reformist, the protests have brought the two factions closer to each other “because at the end of the day we are all in the same boat.” Many have abandoned hope of reform and have called for a referendum on a secular republic.
This disillusionment is with good reason. Recently, on April 23, at a talk before the American Council on Foreign Relations, foreign minister Javad Zarif denied the persecution of homosexuals while equating compulsory hijab for women with McDonalds' dress code prohibiting topless customers. He also claimed that being a Baha’i is not a crime. The Iranian judiciary would disagree with him. On the same day as his charm offensive in Washington, a court in Ahvaz sentenced Ms. Mitra Badrnejad to prison for the crime of “membership to the Baha'i religious organization”. She joined the ranks of thousands of other Baha’is who have faced executions, torture, imprisonment, denial of employment and education, and destruction of their places of worship and cemeteries.
Ayatollah Khamenei has openly condemned them as untouchables. The obsessive hatred of Baha'is has extended to Iran's Houthi proxies in Yemen, who have recently called for butchering Baha'is in what arguably constitutes incitement to genocide. As political unrest intensifies, the scapegoating of Baha'is could become much worse.
Mr. Chair and honourable members of the subcommittee, this is a time of great hope but also a time of great danger. Iran could go in many different directions in the coming months. The challenge is empowering the Iranian people to build a better future through non-violent means.
I thank you very much for your time and attention.