Home News Sanctions U.S. Senators Support the Bill to Sanction Khamenei and Raisi

U.S. Senators Support the Bill to Sanction Khamenei and Raisi

US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and 16 other Republican Senators have introduced legislation on Thursday [July 15] to impose human rights sanctions on Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the President-elect Ebrahim Raisi.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, the Junior Republican Senator from Texas and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joined 16 other Senators in introducing a bill to sanction Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Cruz said: “Raisi is responsible for the butchering of tens of thousands of innocent Iranians. They should both be subject to the full force of American sanctions. I am proud to introduce this legislation to ensure we continue imposing critical sanctions to isolate the Iranian regime and block their malign activities.”

The bill urges the United States government to “impose sanctions with respect to the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Sayyid Ebrahim Raisol-Sadati, who was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 2021 presidential election”.

Who are these two Iranian officials? Well, Raisi actually played a vital role in the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners, serving on the death committee and sending thousands of political prisoners, mostly Iranian Resistance supporters, to their death in just a few months. He also served as Judiciary Chief since 2019 and actually oversaw the violent crackdown on protesters during the November 2019 uprising.

While Khamenei has been responsible for many thousands of deaths over the past 32 years (he took power in 1989), not only through the violent suppression of dissidents but also the general policies that have affected the lives of the Iranian people.

Khamenei selected Raisi as the new president on June 19, as he was expected to do, which is one of the reasons that many people boycotted the election to display their support for regime change.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer, a Republican who co-sponsored this bill, said: “Ayatollah Khamenei and Ebrahim Raisi have used their positions to enrich themselves while terrorizing Iranian citizens and America’s allies. Our bill would prevent [any President] from rolling back the sanctions placed on these morally bankrupt members of the Iranian regime.”

Thom Tillis, the Republican Senator from North Carolina, said that the U.S. needs to hold Iranian leaders to account for their decades of “violence, terrorism, and human rights abuses”. He advised that Khamenei and Raisi need to be sanctioned under the Global Magnistky Act because it is not the time to ease the pressure on the dictators who are systemically oppressed the people, who are trying their hardest to overthrow the regime.

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