The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland began this week with the obvious absence of the Iranian regime’s president, Ebrahim Raisi. Upon hearing of the request made to the Metropolitan Police and the Scottish Police to arrest him for his crimes against humanity if he was to step foot in the United Kingdom, he backed out of attending.

Unlike Iran’s former presidents, Raisi is aware that he cannot travel freely to the West because of his reputation as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’, owing to his involvement in the 1988 massacre in Iran during which 30,000 political prisoners were brutally executed.

Struan Stevenson, a former Member of the European Parliament representing Scotland, said, “His humiliating climbdown maybe because he has woken up to the fact that as president, he has inherited a poisoned chalice. He is the zombie president of a dying regime.”

The economy in Iran has collapsed due to the Iranian regime’s incompetence and their staggering levels of corruption, while their involvement in proxy wars throughout the Middle East has severely destabilized the region and cost the lives of tens of thousands of citizens.

The looting of people’s wealth for their own ill-gains has resulted in 70 percent of the Iranian population living in extreme poverty and struggling to survive. Added to the economic crisis is the regime’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, which is about to enter the sixth wave, and has already caused the deaths of over 460,000 people in Iran.

Stevenson said, “Raisi has tried to hide his embarrassment by claiming that he had not been invited to attend COP26 in Glasgow. That lie has been exposed by the fact that there is a team from Iran present at the summit.”

Raisi knows that many human rights organizations and government agencies are examining his history of human rights abuses. Along with his involvement in the 1988 massacre, they are looking into his role in the murder of 1,500 protesters during the nationwide uprising in November 2019, as well as the hundreds of executions he oversaw as the head of the judiciary.

Following his rise to the presidency earlier this year, he is even more aware now that diplomatic immunity will not protect him from being arrested and tried by international powers. Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has the authority to charge Raisi at any time with crimes against humanity, torture, murder, and genocide.

Stevenson said, “The news last month that the ICC had launched a full probe into Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, for his involvement in crimes against humanity and murder, sent shockwaves to Tehran.”

Any involvement of Iran at COP26 is questionable, considering that the head of the regime’s Environmental Protection Agency was reported saying that not even an enemy ‘could never have damaged Iran’s natural resources and environment the way the mullahs have’.

The environment in Iran has been pushed to the verge of destruction by devastating floods, forest fires, severe air pollution, widespread water shortages, and the uncontrolled desertification of agricultural land, all thanks to the regime’s incompetence and corruption. The biggest role in this catastrophe is held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who have been profiteering off of Iran’s environmental crises.

The IRGC’s dam-building program is the main cause of the rapid desertification. As a result, Iran has lost more than two-thirds of its agricultural land because of droughts, and sand and dust storms are damaging the remaining crops.

Stevenson said, “During its 40 years of power, the mullahs have not only slaughtered the Iranian people, violated human rights and spread terror around the world, they have also caused irreversible destruction to the Iranian environment.”

Source » irannewsupdate