Belgian foreign minister Hadja Lahbib is facing calls for resignation after granting visas to delegations from Iranian and Russian cities to attend a mayors convention in Brussels last week.
Vandecasteele, 42, was arrested on a visit to Iran in February 2022 and sentenced in January to 40 years in prison and 74 lashes on trumped-up charges including spying.
He was freed last month in a prisoner swap with an Iranian diplomat who had been convicted in Belgium for a terror bombing plot in France.
The "Brussels Urban Summit," which took place last week, saw the mayors of more than 300 international cities including Tehran, and also members of the European Commission and the European Parliament, gathering to discuss challenges cities are facing.
Tehran's mayor, Alireza Zakani is a hardliner who was a leader in the Basij student militia.
State secretary for external relations & foreign trade of the Brussels government Pascal Smet resigned on Sunday over the all-expenses paid trip.
Belgo-Iranian lawmaker Darya Safai, from opposition party N-VA, said on Monday the party is asking for Lahbib's resignation.
"We need a minister who accepts her responsibility," Safai told Matin Premiere radio.
"The pending question is why did she agree to give these visas? Why only three weeks after the release of Olivier Vandecasteele, she accepts that terrorists come to Brussels? And why must the name of Belgium always be sullied by foreign relations which it cannot manage to control?" she said.
Belgian lawmakers will meet on June 21 to discuss the issue.
Based on Reporting by Reuters
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On March 3, 2023, Ray English, the former Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, responded to our co-authored op-ed published on February 24, 2023 in which English disagrees with our claim that Oberlin College Professor of Religion Mohammad Jaffar Mahallati played a role in covering up the mass execution of political prisoners in his country (the 1988 “prison massacres”) during his tenure as Iran’s UN Ambassador (1988-89). Rehearsing Oberlin’s official response (published on the college website on October 28, 2021), English argues that the allegations against Mahallati are unsupported by evidence. Mahallati’s defenders rest their case on the top-secret nature of the massacres, which allegedly made it impossible for him to have “real time knowledge” of the events.
We do not doubt that Mahallati’s geographical distance from Iran made it difficult for him to know all the details. However, the international press and Amnesty International began reporting about the massacres already in summer 1988. We know that Mahallati officially claimed that these reports were exaggerated or false. We also know that Mahallati went to Iran in late August 1988 where he met with Hashemi Rafsanjani (the second most important political leader after Ayatollah Khomeini).
Mahallati also misled his UN colleagues by claiming that the massacre’s victims were battlefield casualties. The truth is that most of them had been in prison for years prior to their execution. Finally, Mahallati argued that reputable sources with a long history of professional journalism and human rights investigations (The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and Amnesty International) were misled by left-wing guerrilla fighters based in Iraq who were peddling false information.
Ray English highlights Mahallati’s role as a peace broker in the Iran-Iraq war. He argues that Mahallati’s humanitarian impulses are evident from his effort to set up a UN human rights delegation to investigate claims about possible human rights violations. English also tells us that Mahallati was briefly detained after his official term expired because he fell in disfavor with regime hardliners.
A more careful look at the evidence calls into question these claims. In 2018, Mahallati wrote a letter to the President of the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) in which he denied that he had been detained. Instead, he claimed that these rumors were spread by regime hardliners who branded him as an American spy. Mahallati’s proposal to create a UN delegation to investigate the prison massacres was not necessarily borne of humanitarian impulses either. Rather, it was based on a quid pro quo, whereby Iran’s government would agree to the committee if the UN dropped a censure motion against the country for human rights violations.
According to a New York Times article from 26 November 1988, Mohammed Jafar Mahallati told the General Assembly's Third Committee that “Iran would admit a United Nations human rights investigator and cooperate if the resolution is watered down” and that “the committee has to choose between a confrontation or a cooperative approach.” Thirty-seven UN records and international media reports show that Mahallati conditioned visits to Iran by the UN Special Representative on the removal of critical references to the mass executions from the December 1988 resolution of the General Assembly.
When the UN proceeded to censure Iran for human rights violations anyway, Mahallati rescinded his offer. It was only in 1990, a whole year after Mahallati left his post, that Iran finally allowed UN officials to conduct the investigation. However, the three visits UN officials paid to Iran between 1990 and 1992 were highly staged occasions, as often happens in authoritarian regimes.
As internationally renowned human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson noted, Iran denied the UN delegation independent access to prisons, prisoners, and potential witnesses. We also know that Mahallati used diplomatic immunity to defend himself against any allegations of wrongdoing, as he did when he attacked minority Baha’i communities or supported the fatwa against Nobel Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie.
Iran’s leaders have deliberately obfuscated the country’s abysmal human rights record for decades now. In this case, the goal is to demonize the 1988 prison massacre victims as violent left-wing terrorists aligned with Israel and American imperialism. Just how plausible is a conspiracy theory in which Islamic Marxist revolutionaries serve as stooges of Zionism and American power? Oberlin College’s administration should not play the role of a fellow traveler for a dictatorship that systematically violates human rights, not the least of Iran’s women who have stood up against dictatorship so bravely in recent months. Nor should it obfuscate, rather than honestly investigate, the role of a professor in covering up the crimes of Iran’s authoritarian and misogynist regime.
(Note: Dr Frieda Fuchs was mistakenly introduced as "Assistant Professor at Oberlin College" when this article was published. Consequently correction was made.)
Opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of Iran International
Confidential letters published by the group Uprising till Overthrow revealed that the regime officials are aware their support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine may lead to criminal cases against Tehran for its involvement in the war.
Referring to the annulment of at least five agreements between Iran and Ukraine over the issue, the documents pointed out that Kiev has also sanctioned a large number of Iranian officials and also rejected calls for negotiations by the Islamic Republic.
The point that comes across in the hacked letters by General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the foreign ministry sent to the president’s office is that they know very little about the military cooperation with Moscow, suggesting that it is handled by the Revolutionary Guards, most probably with the approval of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Rolling with the punches, the organizations offered a number of suggestions to compensate for the “loss of dignity” by making demands from the Russian government.
In the documents, the General Staff asked the government not to deny Iran’s involvement in the war and its supply of drones to Moscow because the European and other Western countries are evidently sure about the military support.
Among the ways to dampen the effects of Iran’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is holding talks with Kyiv officials to keep the channel of interaction open between the two countries.
The correspondence with the president’s office shows the regime’s concerns over the Ukrainian government downgrading relations with the Islamic Republic, calling for planning for such a scenario through preparing the regime’s embassy in Moldova to handle consular matters.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that the diplomatic missions of the regime in European countries should become more active so that they can be aware of the possible plans of European countries for any possible legal action against Iran, implying that they are aware that regime officials can be prosecuted for their involvement in the war.
Noting that 37 countries have filed lawsuits against Russia at the International Criminal Court, the ministry said that such a lawsuit can also be filed against the Islamic Republic.
The hacktivist group ‘Uprising till Overthrow -- affiliated with the Albania-based opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) group -- produced documents in May showing that it breached 120 servers of the presidential office, getting access to internal communications, meetings minutes, President Ebrahim Raisi’s online conference platforms and about 1,300 computers inside the offices. The MEK-affiliated group has been releasing the documents on its social media accounts.
Iran has repeatedly denied sending armed drones to Russia after Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022, claiming that any shipments occurred before the war.
However, Russia has used hundreds of Iranian-made drones to attack Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian targets, with Kyiv reporting more supplies in December as Moscow’s stocks were used up.
Western powers have strongly objected to Iran's decision to arm Russia with Kamikaze drones, and possibly other weapons and ammunition.
