More than 100 Euro MPs Urge President of European Parliament to Call for Ending Executions in Iran, during his visit to Tehran

On the occasion of the European Day Against Death Penalty, the Friends of a Free Iran in the European Parliament (FOFI) which consists of Euro MPs from different political groups held a meeting in Strasbourg.

 They strongly condemned the mass executions in Iran under the “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani with over 2000 death sentences carried out since he took office two years ago. They noted that Rouhani himself has defended these executions and has stated clearly on Iranian TV that death sentences “are the law of God” and must be implemented.

The participants discussed the upcoming visit of President Martin Schulz to Iran and initiated a joint letter to him. This letter, already signed by 115 members of the European Parliament, calls on President Schulz to “to use the occasion of this visit to publicly denounce human rights abuses in Iran and call for ending public executions.” It adds “the European Parliament which represents half a billion European citizens with common democratic values has a duty to put human rights as a top priority for any expansion of relationship with this regime, setting an example for our EU governments.”
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 IRAN: Letter by 115 Members of the European Parliament to Martin Schulz

We have been informed about your planned visit to Iran at the end of this week. Exactly a year ago today, you wrote a letter to the Iranian Parliament, expressing your grave concern about the case of the 26-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari, sentenced to death for defending herself against sexual assault by a security agent. You asked for a “fair retrial without recourse to death penalty.” However Ms Jabbari was hanged two weeks later despite the world outrage.

It is regrettable that while the EU and the world powers were negotiating over a nuclear deal with Iran, the government of the ‘moderate’ President Hassan Rouhani was busy hanging hundreds of its citizens, many of them in public. Amnesty International released a shocking report that 700 executions took place in Iran only during the first six months of this year. “Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale,” Amnesty International stressed.