Mr. Speaker, this past weekend I participated in an international conference in Paris in support of the struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran and in remembrance of yet another massacre of 52 Iranian residents of Camp Ashraf in Iraq, protected persons under international humanitarian law.
The victims' families and former political prisoners, with whom I met, were particularly pained by what they felt was the silence of the international community in the face of ongoing massive domestic repression in Iran, where hundreds of Iranians have been executed since President Rouhani's election, where Rouhani has appointed a justice minister who is a person directly responsible in the 1988 massacre of 5,000 political prisoners, and where the massacres of Camp Ashraf residents, of which the most recent was the fifth of its kind, continue with impunity, while other residents have disappeared.
It is our responsibility, as they have asked me to convey, to break the silence, to hold the Iranian and Iraqi governments to account, to secure protection for the Ashraf residents and to ensure, as they cautioned me, that nuclear negotiations must not serve as a distraction from the ongoing massive violation of human rights in Iran.