The after effects of decoupling the Iranian regime’s human rights violations from economic sanctions.

On Thursday afternoon, 7 April, Dowlat Nowrouzi from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), moderated a live online conference between three critics on ‘Human rights abuses and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism by the mullahs’ regime in Iran’. Not skirting around the issue the panel commented on the Iranian regime’s new economic status, that having completed the necessary steps in a deal to restrict its nuclear program, economic sanctions on the Iranian religious dictatorship have been lifted.

But this not only opens up trade and economy, it also ignites a moral question between the three seminar delegates Mr. Egidijus Vareikis (Lithuanian MP), Lord Carlile of Berriew (terrorism legislation specialist) and Mr. Steve McCabe (British MP) who looked at how it’s possible for Western governments to trade with a regime which still remains accountable for unspeakable atrocities as condemned by Italy in December. A debate further fanned by acknowledgement of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s intended visit to Tehran this month.

Only the third Western leader to make an official visit to Tehran in over a decade, he’s following up a trade deal worth up to 17 billion euros ($18.42 billion) to the Iranian regime. Casting suspicion on Renzi’s visit during the debate, Lord Carlile of Berriew expressed his shock saying ‘no head of state should visit without conditions being intact in terms of human rights’, followed by British MP McCabe criticizing Renzi, afraid that ‘if you decouple human rights from the issues of security, [then] you cannot have human rights.’

On moving forward, UK MP McCabe highlighted that ‘the best thing the UN and Western government can do is to set out a criteria from which to judge Iran’s behavior’, which may ‘lead to more [rather than the current lifting of] economic sanctions.’ Lord Carlile of Berriew tried to be positive saying that ‘in going to Tehran there [there] is very substantial trade to be done.’

But, with a quick caveat, he clarified his position saying that ‘escalating economic sanctions is the only weapon the West has’. To the Lithuanian MP Vareikis this translated as a black-list, saying that ‘we always need to have the list of government’s right’s violations, and sooner or later the regime will [get] tired [of] that.’

UK MP McCabe said ‘drawing up economic sanctions [will] make it harder for them to follow up programs.’ We must put in ‘restrictions on the materials the Iranians can get their hands on.’ NCRI’s Nowrouzi expressed alarmed that ‘despite being released from some of these sanctions, the money [in Iran] is being used to buy weapons for Shiite militia and from other Russian forces.’

On the effectiveness of a black-list, Nowrouzi went on to make a comment about the regime’s rhetoric, that the clerical regime’s political approach is to ‘repeatedly claim that crimes are committed in the name of Islam’, for which Nowrouzi cannot agree. In reality, the emergence of Daesh has nothing to do with Islam, but effected instead by the slaughter of Sunnis and Shiites by the Iran regime. As a way to curb the spread of the threat, UK MP McCabe posited ‘using [of] effective economic and allied black-listing’ as a start.