British minister's visit to Tehran amid mass executions and meeting with officials responsible for 120,000 political executions encourages more executions and betrays human rights and democratic values

Mr. Philip Hammond

NCRI - The visit of Mr. Philip Hammond, the British foreign minister, to Tehran and his meeting with leaders of the religious fascism ruling Iran encourages the clerical regime to continue and intensify torture and killing and export of terrorism and fundamentalism. This visit and similar ones are against the national interests and the will of the Iranian people to overthrow the regime and establish democracy and popular sovereignty in Iran.

The clerical regime leaders whom Philip Hammond will meet are among the officials responsible for 120,000 political executions including the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988 and the execution of more than 2000 prisoners during Rouhani's tenure. During this period, in addition to the increase of executions, repression of and discrimination against women and ethnic and religious minorities has been intensified in an unprecedented way.

Amnesty International said in its July 23 statement that in the first half of 2015 at least 694 prisoners have been executed and this "paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale … we are likely to see more than 1,000 state-sanctioned deaths by the year’s end."

The people who will be meeting Mr. Hammond in Tehran are the highest authorities responsible for export of terrorism and fundamentalism and massacre of innocent people in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. Meeting with such individuals who must be tried on charges of crimes against humanity for crimes inside and outside Iran only provokes hatred of the Iranian people.

While the justification for this trip and similar trips is the nuclear agreement of the mullahs with the world six powers, the regime's highest officials stressed that they don't have any commitment to observe the UN Security Council resolutions stemming from this agreement. On Saturday, August 21, the mullahs' president Hassan Rouhani said Resolution 2231 "is not an obstacle for our work and we buy and will buy weapons wherever we feel necessary and we will not wait for anyone and any approval by anyone and we will not look at any resolution. If somewhere we need to sell weapons, we will. We will sell our weapons without any consideration, without any resolution."

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran calls on all defenders of human rights and democracy and all supporters of peace and tranquility in the region and the world to condemn this visit and take immediate action to cancel it.