Washington, DC; April 29, 2021
Within the first 100 days of the new U.S. Administration, 225 bipartisan cosponsors of H.Res.118 (House majority) urged President to place ending the Iranian regime’s terrorism, its egregious human rights violations as well as supporting the Iranian people’s struggle for a free democratic non-nuclear republic Iran at the core of U.S. policy on Iran. The resolution was presented to the President with an accompanying letter from the bill’s main bipartisan sponsors.
In the letter, Congressmen Tom McClintock and Brad Sherman note that H.Res.118 deserves attention because it “emphasizes three important pillars, all of which should play central role in your administration’s policy towards Iran: democracy, human rights, and holding human rights abusers accountable.” The resolution highlights the desire of Iranian people to achieve freedom and democracy as evident in repeated rounds of protests in over 100 cities across Iran. The resolution focuses attention on the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, the killing of 1,500 protesters in November 2019 and widespread persecution of Iran’s oppressed minorities. Similarly, H.Res.118 urges the administration to play a key role in holding the regime accountable for these crimes against humanity.
With H.Res.118, an overwhelming bipartisan House majority also address Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism. It particularly notes the February 4th Belgian court verdict against Assadollah Assadi, a top regime diplomat in Europe, who was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years for commanding a terror plot against the 2018 Free Iran Gathering in Paris.
The resolution reminds the global community that, “Tens of thousands of people” were targeted by the regime for gathering in support of, “opposition leader Mrs. Maryam Rajavi’s 10-point plan for the future of Iran, which calls for the universal right to vote, free elections, and a market economy, and advocates gender, religious, and ethnic equality, a foreign policy based on peaceful coexistence, and a nonnuclear Iran.”
H.Res.118 recognizes the rights of the Iranian people and their struggle to establish a democratic, secular, and nonnuclear Republic of Iran while calling on relevant United States Government agencies to work with European allies, including those in the Balkans where Iran has expanded its presence, “to hold Iran accountable for breaching diplomatic privileges, and to call on nations to prevent the malign activities of the Iranian regime’s diplomatic missions, with the goal of closing them down, including the Iranian Embassy in Albania.”
