Republican News · Thursday 4 July 2002

Iranian opposition petitions EU

The People's Mojahedin, Iran's main opposition, has called on the EU to rethink its decision, in return for several trade contracts worth $7 billion, to include the movement on its list of terrorist groups.

International human rights organisations have expressed concern at Iran's human rights situation. Images of public hangings and barbaric punishments have shocked the world. The state-run media have reported more than 200 executions in the first five months of this year. In recent years, religious courts have issued two dozen stoning-to-death sentences.

The Mojahedin points out that in the past two decades, 120,000 political prisoners, including tens of thousands of women from the Mojahedin, have been executed. Many more have been tortured. Iran's clerical rulers also bear full responsibility for the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988, killed because they belonged to the Mojahedin Organisation.

Parliamentary majorities in Britain, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the United States, as well as hundreds of MPs in other European countries, have repeatedly declared support for the Mojahedin as "a legitimate resistance movement' and the "antithesis of fundamentalism and terrorism".