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When Iran's evil regime demands justice, the world can only gasp

By Struan Stevenson
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks at the Iranian parliament in Tehran on Tuesday. Photo by Maryam Rahmanian/UPI
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks at the Iranian parliament in Tehran on Tuesday. Photo by Maryam Rahmanian/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 28 (UPI) -- The arrogance of the Iranian government is breathtaking. The brutal clerics who rule Iran are taking the United States to the International Court of Justice for withdrawing from former President Barack Obama's flawed nuclear deal and reimposing sanctions on their country. They claim that America is in breach of a 1955 bilateral Treaty of Amity that regulates economic and consular ties between the United States and Iran.

Here we have a rogue state who signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1970 but was found to be secretly developing nuclear weapons following the Iranian revolution in 1979, demanding justice in the international courts.

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Here we have a fascist regime, which pours money and troops into Syria to back Bashar al-Assad's bloody civil war; they provide the Houthi rebels in Yemen with money and missiles; they sponsor the brutal militias in Iraq who have murdered thousands of innocent Sunnis; and they provide limitless support for the terrorist Hezbollah organization in Lebanon; and yet they think they can call for justice in the international courts.

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Here we have a regime that in 1988 coordinated the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in prisons across Iran. The United Nations now has irrefutable evidence of this atrocity that must rank as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the late 20th century. The mass executions were carried out on the basis of a fatwa by the regime's then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A "death committee" of four senior officials approved all the executions. Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, a member of that "death committee," was until mid-2017 President Hassan Rouhani's justice minister. When his part in the murders became known publicly, he was replaced by Alireza Avaie, who himself was a prominent executioner during the 1988 massacre, in his role as chief prosecutor in the city of Dezful. Avaie has been on the EU's blacklist for years. So, a regime that appoints a known criminal and executioner as its justice minister believes it can take a legitimate case to the International Court of Justice?

Here we have a regime that tortures, rapes, sodomizes and executes political prisoners. A regime that flogs, immolates, amputates limbs, gouges out eyes and hangs people in public. A regime that has executed more than 3,500 people, including women and children, since the so-called "moderate" Rouhani became president. A dictatorship that governs through corruption, bribery, blackmail, extortion and fear, that has arrested and imprisoned at least 8,000 peaceful protesters during the ongoing uprising that has raged across Iran for the past eight months, where many of those arrested have been tortured to death or have simply "disappeared."

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This is a regime that is recognized as the godfather of terror worldwide and uses its network of embassies as terror cells, as evidenced by the arrest on July 1 of Asadollah Assadi, a diplomat from the Iranian embassy in Vienna. Assadi has been charged with plotting terrorist murder by handing over a bomb and detonator to two Iranian agents, instructing them to bomb a rally in Paris organized by the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK) and National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the main democratic opposition to the mullahs.

In America, the U.S. Department of Justice on Aug. 9 announced that two Intelligence Ministry agents of the mullahs' regime, Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar and Majid Ghorbani, had been arrested and charged with spying on and plotting to assassinate supporters of the PMOI/MEK.

This is a misogynist regime, which has imprisoned the young British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on trumped up espionage charges and is holding countless other women in deplorable conditions simply for attempting to uphold demands for human rights and women's rights inside Iran.

There is no justice in Iran. That is why its citizens are rising up in anger and frustration at the cruelty and criminal corruption of the mullahs and their distorted fundamentalist, medieval version of Islam. It is a bad joke that this murderous dictatorship thinks it can appeal for justice in the international courts. The temerity of the mullahs' regime can only leave the civilized world gasping in amazement.

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Struan Stevenson is coordinator of Campaign for Iran Change, served as a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an international lecturer on the Middle East and is also president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association.

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