Irwin Cotler, special counsel on human rights and international justice to the Liberal party, and co-author of this piece, is introducing a private member’s bill in Parliament today called the Iran Accountability Act (IAA). While it expressly holds Iran to account — for its genocidal threats, nuclear ambitions and domestic repressions –it also functions to hold Canada to account.
As a signatory to the 1948 Genocide Convention, Canada has a responsibility to prevent genocide — and to punish incitement to genocide — that it has largely ignored in the case of the world’s greatest threat. The IAA would change this; it affirms Canada as a world leader in fighting impunity and takes a stand against Iranian criminal actions.
We were in Geneva when the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stepped to the podium at the United Nations and delivered an address at a conference ostensibly aimed at fighting racism. With that speech — fettered with anti-Semitic comments (on Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less) and rooted in the very intolerance that the Durban Review Conference was supposed to be combating — the use and abuse of the United Nations reached a new, shameful low.
President Ahmadinejad is a man who incites to hatred and genocide in violation of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition. He has used the podium of the United Nations General Assembly to invoke classic anti-Semitic tropes reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and is engaged in the massive repression of the rights of his own people — particularly the Baha’i religious minority of Iran.
He is pursuing the most destructive of weaponry in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and he is complicit in crimes against humanity through genocidal terrorist proxies.
Furthermore, Ahmadinejad has presided over the parading in the streets of Tehran of a missile draped with the emblem “Wipe Israel off the map,” while exhorting the masses with cries of “Death to Israel.” He denies the Holocaust — even as he incites to a new one — and warns Muslims that if they recognize Israel they will burn in the umma of Islam.
Such a person belongs in the docket of the accused, not the podium of the United Nations.
And yet the danger of a genocidal, nuclear and rights-violating Iran did not begin with President Ahmadinejad — and will not end simply with the completion of his tenure. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has stated that “it is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region.”
Indeed, President Ahmadinejad has invoked religion to confirm the obligation to destroy Israel. When he delivered his most infamous incitement — that Israel should be “wiped off the map” — he made it clear that he was simply repeating what “the imam” — former supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — said.
The IAA seeks to divest Canada from investment in Iran. It establishes a mechanism to monitor incitement to hate in Iran, and would render the most virulent inciters inadmissible to Canada. It freezes the assets of those that contribute to Iran’s nuclear or military infrastructure — as well as its machinery of hate. It uses the framework of the international community to bring Iran to justice through recognized principles of international law. And, similar to a recent American legislative proposal, it targets Iran’s dependence on imported petroleum — so long as the incitement continues.
As well, the act emphasizes that targeting diplomacy solely at Iran’s nuclear threat is a mistake. To do so is to ignore the terrifying and vilifying context in which that threat operates and, however inadvertently, sanitize the genocidal incitement at its core.
Let us be clear: The Iran Accountability Act does not target the great civilization and peoples of Iran. To the contrary, the bill takes as its premise that these peoples are increasingly the object of Iran’s human rights violations. It is in their best interest that the international community hold Iran’s leaders to account, and refuse to acquiesce in their suffering.
As Edmund Burke cautioned, it is clear that this evil will triumph unless good people do something to stop it. The Iran Accountability Act would ensure that Canada would do precisely that. We hope the government will listen.
Irwin Cotler, a Montreal MP, is the former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada. Alan Dershowitz is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University.
Photo:The building housing the reactor of Bushehr nuclear power plant at the Iranian port town of Bushehr, 1200 Kms south of Tehran ( BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images)
