Offord was among the politicians who talked about Britain’s unsettling business relationship with the regime in Tehran. He said, “The current UK policy on pursing business opportunities in Iran in the post-nuclear deal era risks empowering the Revolutionary Guards,” adding, “This paramilitary arm of the Supreme Leader is the major force in exporting terror out of Iran and suppressing any popular dissent, controlling close to 70 per cent of Iran’s economy.”
An investigation into the events of the summer of 1988 was called for by the conference; when the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a Fatwa, and some 30,000 political prisoners were massacred in the space of a few months, and buried secretly in mass graves.
Many of the officials responsible for the massacre currently hold some of the highest positions in the regime.
President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Maryam Rajavi, addressed the conference in a video message. She said, “The regime preserves its power by these atrocities, even as the anti-government protests spread across the country,” and continued, “If the international community had not remained silent and passive in this regard, letting the criminals evade justice, the wave of executions and repression in Iran could not have continued to date.”
The Iranian authorities carried out over 1000 executions last year, according to the UN and international organizations like Amnesty International.
Amnesty International published a report on January 26 this year, listing 73 executions of juvenile offenders since 2005 and warned that in violation of international law and conventions prohibiting the execution of juveniles, “at least 160 juvenile offenders are currently on death row.”
