Thank you.
This week marks the seventh annual Iran Accountability Week held in Ottawa. I would like to thank Canada's former minister of justice, the Honourable Irwin Cotler, and all the MPs who have organized and supported these efforts.
Over the last seven years, parliamentary committees have heard a great deal of testimony from victims of the Iranian regime. These testimonies have only confirmed, in no uncertain terms, that Iran is one of the most malevolent players in the international community.
The regime is the globe's leading state sponsor of terrorism and home to thousands of the most egregious human rights violators on the planet. It has been directly complicit in President al-Assad's slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, has executed and tortured tens of thousands of its own citizens, and continues to plan bombings and assassinations in western countries. Iran also remains a global leader in the execution of minors and is responsible for the arrest, torture and murder of Canadian citizens.
Over the last week, you have heard testimony from several extraordinarily courageous women from Iran who have been at the forefront of confronting this regime.
I have come here today to try to reinforce their message. I am an individual who has worked with women's groups across the globe in battling for the rights of women who have suffered from Islamist extremism.
Unlike their western counterparts, these women are not fighting for inclusiveness or fairness, but for their lives—and for the most basic of rights related to the word “human”.
Last year, in an article I co-authored with Danny Eisen of the Canadian Coalition Against Terror, or C-CAT, we pondered what the #MeToo movement, so popular in the west, might mean in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I quote:
#MeToo — I too am one of thousands of Iranian women who have been raped by the regime's prison personnel with the consent of government authorities.
#MeToo — I too am one of the thousands of Iranian women who have had the skin torn from my back by floggings for supposed crimes of "inappropriate" behavior.
#MeToo — I too am an Iranian woman or girl who can be murdered by male relatives with almost complete impunity under Iranian law.
These women who have appeared before you have clearly displayed the dignity that the Canadian government's feminist international assistance policy has specifically identified as a goal for the women across the globe it aims to help. I believe Canada should now display the same conviction.
In this regard, I concur with Senator Housakos, who stated last week that Iran Accountability Week isn't just about holding Iran accountable; it's also about our own accountability. The senator, to my mind, is entirely correct.
While Parliament is to be fully commended for enabling these women to publicly expose the cruelties of the Iranian regime, emphatically hearing those narratives without taking concrete action to address them cannot be construed as holding this regime accountable. Nor can we honestly declare that in failing to do so, we have upheld the highest standards of our own publicly stated convictions.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been brutally consistent, at great financial and political cost to the regime, in pursuing its publicly stated values of crushing minorities, executing minors and promoting terror across the globe. We must be no less diligent than the regime in following through on our stated commitments.
In its departmental plan of 2018-19, Global Affairs Canada publicly committed to hold Iran to account for human rights violations and to implement robust sanctions against the regime. However, despite Tehran's global web of malevolent activities and its standing as a leading human rights violator, not a single regime offender has been subject to Canada's Magnitsky sanctions. This includes those identified by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights as having been involved in arrest, torture and murder of Canadians.
Why has Canada listed Venezuelan, Russian, Burmese and Saudi violators under this law but given the Iranian regime a pass? Where are the robust sanctions that were promised by Global Affairs?
Similarly, on June 12, 2018, Parliament passed a motion stipulating that Canada, “...immediately designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a listed terrorist entity under the Criminal Code of Canada...”.
The IRGC has certainly earned this listing. From its inception, the IRGC, in its entirety, has supported and directly committed acts constituting terrorist activity under Canadian law. This assertion was recently addressed by the Canadian courts in a lawsuit filed by terror victims. The courts found for the victims and confirmed the culpability of Iran and the IRGC for terror sponsorship as a matter of judicial findings of fact and conclusions of law.
This listing has also been advocated by distinguished Canadians like Irwin Cotler, Bob Rae and many other MPs on both sides of the aisle. However, it has now been almost a year since that parliamentary motion was passed, and the IRGC still remains unlisted.
If, for whatever reason, the courts and Mr. Cotler and Mr. Rae are insufficient in considering the efficacy of such a listing, perhaps we should simply pay closer attention to lran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who put it very simply: “If one day this corps [the IRGC] ceases to exist in our society, the authority of our lslamic Revolution shall collapse”. Clearly, the IRGC is a key force in Iran, enabling the vast industry of persecution suppressing the lranian people, and we should not be empowering this entity by failing to list it for what it is—a terrorist organization.
I would like to close by addressing testimony in the last week that seemed to urge Canada to demonstrate patience in dealing with the lranian regime, saying that listing the IRGC might be secondary to other policy options. ln my opinion, patience in this case is neither a virtue nor an effective tactical strategy with regard to Iran sanctions and listing the IRGC. Patience premised on what? Is it patience for the executions, forced amputations, whippings and terrorism that continue unabated in the IRGC-run prisons on a daily basis? Is it patience for the state sponsor of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, and the regular incitement of genocide against the Jewish people? How patient should the west be with an IRGC that continues to incarcerate and abuse western dual nationals? How patient should the long-suffering Baha'i minority of Iran be, a minority that journalist Terry Glavin has rightly described as not being legally “persons” under lranian law?
No. Those of us urging Canadian lawmakers to sanction this regime are not suffering from intemperance. We simply accept the historical reality that no number of entreaties or extraordinary incentives offered by the western world over the last 40 years have ever had any impact on this regime's outrages. Iran has amply proven that it cannot be bribed, cajoled or browbeaten into relinquishing its principled commitment to atrocity, even at enormous cost to its national interest. The only real precedent we have in at least limiting lranian aggression is the prolonged and crippling sanctions that threatened the very existence of lran's Islamic Revolution and brought Iran to the nuclear negotiating table.
It is my sincere hope that by the time the eighth IAW comes around next year, Canadian patience, which has been sorely tested over many years, will be replaced by principle, and that the IRGC, which is the backbone of oppression in Iran, will be listed under Canadian law.
Thank you.
