Mr. Chair, thank you very much for the kind recognition.
Members of the committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify.
Before I speak in my own voice, I want to begin with the words of someone who cannot be here today. This message was sent to me recently by a dissident in Iran:
It's basically martial law here. Anyone who makes even the smallest move gets arrested. They check phones. They strip people to see if there are pellet wounds, and if they find any, they detain them.
They threatened me too: “If you make the slightest move, we'll raid your home and take you somewhere no trace of you will remain.”
This silence is suffocating me. My phone is tapped. They know where we live. In every alley there's a memorial—young people, beautiful like flowers, buried underground.
I survived only because the bullets didn't find me.
We 90 million people are prisoners and hostages. Without you, we are truly alone.
Honestly...I kind of wish I could become one of the immortalized martyrs too.
This is the psychological and physical reality of daily life for millions of Iranians. Human rights lawyers and experts are now warning that what is unfolding in Iran is not ordinary repression. It's a systemic assault on a civilian population that meets the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.
To understand why Iranians continue to risk everything, it helps to understand how the Islamic Republic governs. Political legitimacy has historically rested on a social contract. The state provides security and sustenance in exchange for the people's consent. As the writer Karim Sadjadpour recently described, what exists in Iran is not a social contract. It's a “predatory lease” imposed in 1979 and “long since expired.”
Iranians still live inside the fever dream of an intolerant cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, who believed that economics was for donkeys. Their private lives are regulated—whom they love, what they watch, what they wear. Women are treated as second-class citizens, beaten, imprisoned and killed over a piece of cloth.
Iranians endure rolling blackouts in a country rich in oil and gas. Their savings have been wiped out as inflation surges and the national currency has lost over 99% of its value since the revolution. Their rivers have dried up. Their lakes are vanishing. Their nation's beloved capital, Tehran, is sinking as groundwater is pumped away. The state's slogans are “Death to America” and ”Death to Israel,” never “Long live Iran.” Patriotism, the revolution's founder declared, was paganism.
While citizens are told to endure austerity, a parallel state dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operates as a tax-exempt mafia, controlling ports, telecoms and construction, while elites smuggle luxury goods through private terminals.
When citizens protest these conditions, they are branded enemies of God. They are executed without due process under charges like “corruption on earth”. The Islamic Republic maintains the highest per capita execution rate in the world. This is not governance. It is extraction, coercion and terror.
Now, that system has entered its most violent phase. Credible reporting and testimonies from inside Iran indicate that since the nationwide uprising began in late December 2025, tens of thousands may have been killed. Human rights organizations stress that communication blackouts make all available figures a severe undercount. By scale, organization and intent, this violence meets the legal threshold for the crime of extermination under the Rome Statute.
Under the responsibility to protect, recognized in international law, this threshold triggers duty. Thousands of detained protesters now face the imminent threat of execution. Senior judicial authorities have warned that continuous protests may be prosecuted as waging war on God, a charge historically used to justify mass executions.
The Iranian people have demonstrated agency, cohesion and extraordinary courage. They have fulfilled their role, and the responsibility to protect now shifts outwards.
For Canada, six actions follow directly from these obligations.
First, protect civilians by degrading the regime's capacity to commit atrocities. Canada's leadership in designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization has already paved the way for others. That leadership must now be matched by coordinated multilateral enforcement targeting IRGC's leadership, assets and infrastructure.
Second, impose sustained economic measures, freeze regime assets globally and dismantle the clandestine tanker networks that finance this repression.
