Irwin Cotler: The Four-Fold Iranian Threat

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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1160530.html

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran – as distinguished from the people of Iran, the objects of massive domestic repression – has emerged as a clear and present danger to international peace and security, regional stability and, increasingly and alarmingly, its own people.

We are witnessing the toxic convergence of four distinct but interrelated threats: the nuclear threat; state-sanctioned incitement to genocide; state sponsorship of international terror; and a persistent, pervasive assault on the rights of its own citizens.

Recent developments have only exposed and magnified this threat at its tipping point. Iran is ramping up uranium enrichment to weapons-grade capability, in defiance of the international community. Moreover, both the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad have reaffirmed their incendiary threats to “obliterate” Israel.

The country’s domestic human rights violations have only intensified since the fraudulent June 12 election, with arrests, disappearances, beatings, torture, extra-judicial killings – replete with Stalinist show-trials and coerced confessions. Indeed, Iran has now jailed more journalists than any other country in the world; arrested thousands of protesters; continues persecuting members of religious minorities, especially the Baha’i; seeks to intimidate and repress students and women’s rights activists. Over the past three years it has executed more prisoners in absolute terms, including juvenile offenders, than any country other than China.

Let there be no mistake about it: Iran is in standing violation – and mocking defiance of – international legal prohibitions, including UN Security Council resolutions and the IAEA regime against the development and production of nuclear weapons. In the last year alone – U.S. President Barack Obama’s year of engagement – Iran has trumpeted higher-grade enrichment capabilities and facilities, tested enhanced long-range missile technology, and begun construction of more lethal centrifuges.

Iran has already committed incitement to genocide, prohibited under the Genocide Convention and international law. Indeed, as one who as Canada’s minister of justice and attorney general prosecuted Rwandans for incitement, I can say that the aggregate of incitement precursors in Ahmadinejad’s Iran parallels the state-sanctioned incitement in Rwanda.

Iran has appointed as its minister of defense, overseeing its nuclear program and weapons development, Ahmad Vahidi, wanted under an Interpol arrest warrant for his role in the greatest terrorist attack in Argentina since the end of World War II – the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center.

The question is then: What is to be done?

While I supported the concept of the year of engagement, the 2009 end-of-year deadline for Iranian compliance has come and gone. Obama’s extended hand was met with a clenched iron fist; there can be no more “business as usual.”

What is needed now, as Obama acknowledged this week, are targeted, calibrated and consequential sanctions. The focus hitherto on the nuclear threat, while understandable and necessary, should not thereby overshadow, marginalize or sanitize the other three menaces described above. the fourfold threat must be responded to with a comprehensive set of remedies.

These should begin with generic sanctions that target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and those who do business with them; target gasoline and other refined petroleum imports to Iran – its economic Achilles’ heel – and the shipping and insurance industries that facilitate them; curb investment in Iran’s energy sector and give companies incentives for not doing so; monitor and enforce arms embargoes; target the Central Bank of Iran, the nerve center of the banking industry; sanction companies that enable Iranian domestic repression; and deny landing rights to the Iranian transportation industry.

Additional threat-specific measures should also be implemented. Regarding human rights violations, governments should regularly condemn actions by the Iranian leadership; provide moral and diplomatic support for the democratic movement in Iran; impose limits and travel restrictions on Iranian officials engaged in repression; keep the issue on the international agenda and in any and all bilateral meetings with Iran; hold Iran accountable before the UN Human Rights Council (which, incredibly, has not passed a single resolution condemning Iran); and work to ensure Iran is not elected to the Council next month.

Regarding incitement to genocide, state parties to the Genocide Convention – such as Canada and the United States – should refer the matter to the UN Security Council for deliberation and accountability – a modest remedy that astonishingly has yet to be taken; initiate an inter-state complaint before the International Court of Justice against Iran, also a state party to the Genocide Convention; and ask the UN Security Council to refer the case to the International Criminal Court for investigation and possible prosecution.

To date, the necessary action has not been forthcoming. As of this writing – as incredible as this is – the sanctioning of the Iranian threats has yet to even be referred to the UN Security Council or any other international agency; indeed, it is not even on the Security Council’s agenda, thereby fostering a culture of impunity for Iran. One can only hope that the supposed agreement of Russia and China to new sanctions, as reported this week, will be realized, and that the sanctions will indeed be comprehensive and consequential.

The time has come – indeed it has passed – to sound the alarm for the international community. Silence is not an option. Action to hold Ahmadinejad’s Iran to account is not simply a policy option, but an international legal obligation of the first order.

The integrity of our commitments to the rule of law and international peace and security – and to the rights of the Iranian people – are at stake. If not us, who? If not now, when?

Irwin Cotler is a Canadian member of parliament and special counsel on international justice and human rights for the Liberal Party. He is a professor of law (on leave) at McGill University, and a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada.

Irwin Cotler: The Four-Fold Iranian Threat

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