Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, honourable members of Parliament and honourable Chair.
I want to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to discuss such an important issue that has affected and will affect many people around the globe and in Canada.
I want to thank the subcommittee and its former and current members for having a unified voice in promoting and defending human rights globally, most notably in Iran.
Mr. Saghah talked about some of the issues. My colleague, Ms. Boorchi, will talk about some of the issues involved in the heartbreaking situation of political prisoners and Iranian prisons.
I want to concentrate my remarks on two major issues. I cannot say how timely this session is to address these issues. First is the shooting down of the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 by two IRGC missiles, when 176 passengers, including 58 Canadians, lost their lives and were killed. The second is Iran's so-called presidential election.
The events involved in the shooting down of the Ukrainian flight have been elaborated on in various meetings, and I'm sure you may have heard the testimony by the families in front of the transport committee and many other forums, so I will not repeat those. The families of the victims are devastated. All they want is justice—justice before compensation—and to hold the Iranian leaders accountable for what the Ontario Superior Court of Justice called a deliberate act of terrorism. I guess that's not too much to ask.
Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau called Iran's behaviour regarding flight PS752 unconscionable. We believe there is enough evidence to take Iran to the international courts. This is what we demand that Canada do, in addition to designating the IRGC a terrorist entity.
The next topic—and I will go very quickly to leave time for questions and answers—is Iran's sham presidential election on June 18, just three days away. The overwhelming call to boycott the election has reached an unprecedented level in recent years. Large segments of society from all walks of life are increasingly calling the election in this regime a sham and illegitimate. Mothers of martyrs of the November 2019 uprising and families of executed and imprisoned political prisoners—including the family of Iranian wrestling champion Navid Afkari, who was executed in 2020—not only all called for boycotting the election but also publicly stated that their vote was to overthrow this regime.
Chanting slogans such as, “We won't vote anymore for we have heard so many lies,” “The people have not forgotten that Raisi is the mass murderer of 1988,” and “Hardliner, reformer, the game is now over,” have become so widespread that social media is full of messages of this kind.
In a posting yesterday, a young man went public and said to Raisi, the so-called front-runner in Iran's presidential election, hand-picked by Khamenei, that Iranians know he is the mass murderer of 1988, and that he knew he was endangering his own life by saying this. He said he was ready for it and that his only request was that when they wanted to hang him, they use a silk rope. Another man tore down posters of Khamenei and pleaded for people to take care of his two kids if he was arrested and executed.
The election in this regime is a farce, not only by our account but now even by those who have fallen out of favour with the regime, including former presidents or leaders of the very same regime who were involved in the mass atrocities.
Raisi, as well as many other officials of this regime, is a top pick for our Magnitsky sanctions. Professor Cotler's Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights published a report with the names of gross human rights abusers, including Raisi, and recommended their inclusion on our sanctions list.
Unfortunately, so far Canada has not added a single individual on that list to its sanctions list, and this is not what a responsible policy is. The minimum Canada can do is to do that and to designate the IRGC a terrorist entity.
The Iranian people will soon decide their own fate, but Canada can and must play a role, such as the one we played in the apartheid regime in South Africa, standing with the Iranian people in their quest for a democratic republic based on the separation of religion and state, gender equality, the abolition of the death penalty and a modern judiciary system that abides by international law.
This is what the people want. They are the very same principles that are enshrined in NCRI president-elect Mrs. Rajavi's 10-point plan and platform for the future Iran.
Thank you.