Iran’s President Cancels UN Trip Amid Lawsuit Demanding Arrest Over ‘Crimes Against Humanity’

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has canceled a planned trip to Geneva, Switzerland to attend the United Nations Global Refugee Forum...

The post Iran’s President Cancels UN Trip Amid Lawsuit Demanding Arrest Over ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during the official farewell ceremony for his trip to New York, at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, Iran, September 17, 2023. Photo: Iran’s Presidency/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has canceled a planned trip to Geneva, Switzerland to attend the United Nations Global Refugee Forum amid international outcry over the participation of the Iranian leader, who faced a fresh legal complaint this week demanding Swiss authorities arrest him for “crimes against humanity.”

Raisi, long accused of major human rights abuses, was set to participate in the UN event and address the forum on Wednesday. However, the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that Raisi had canceled his trip.

UN officials told French and Swiss media that Iran’s delegation would be led by Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

News of the nixed Raisi trip came after three alleged victims of the Iranian regime’s violent crackdown on dissidents in the 1980s filed a legal complaint on Monday asking Swiss authorities to arrest the Iranian president when he landed in Switzerland. The complaint also asked for Raisi’s prosecution “over his participation in acts of genocide, torture, extrajudicial executions, and other crimes against humanity.”

The UN, the US government, and human rights groups have documented and condemned how Iran notoriously executed thousands of political prisoners in 1988, when Raisi was deputy prosecutor of Tehran and part of a so-called “death committee” that ordered several of the killings.

Raisi was asked about his alleged involvement in the 1988 mass killings at a news conference in June 2021.

“If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised,” he said. “I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.”

Two years earlier, an audiotape was released of the late Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, the one-time designated successor to former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, lashing out in 1988 at Raisi and others alleged to be complicit in facilitating the mass killings, declaring, “You all will be judged as the biggest criminals in history.”

Raisi hasn’t just been tied to human rights abuses in 1988. In December 2019, the US government confirmed that the Iranian regime killed about 1,500 anti-government protesters as part of a crackdown by security forces on demonstrations the prior month.

The Treasury Department sanctioned Raisi, who was judiciary chief at the time and had a direct role in the suppression effort, for “advancing” the regime’s “domestic and foreign oppression.”

More recently, Raisi has been assailed by Western leaders for overseeing Tehran’s crackdown on the wave of nationwide demonstrations that erupted in Sept. 2022 with the killing of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, the young Kurdish woman whose death at the hands of Iran’s morality police sparked protests against the ruling Islamist regime on an unprecedented scale.

During the latest protests, it is estimated that hundreds of Iranians have been killed and tens of thousands arrested.

“We firmly believe that the United Nations, as a bastion of human rights and justice, should not compromise its reputation by extending an invitation to an individual accused of grave human rights violations,” the complaint said of Raisi attending the Global Refugee Forum.

The UN came under heavy fire for allowing Raisi to attend the event in Geneva alongside personnel from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a US-designated terrorist organization.

Over 300 former UN officials, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, academics, and other influential leaders signed a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, president of the Swiss Confederation, and top European leaders expressing “deep concern regarding the planned participation of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi the upcoming 2023 Global Refugee Forum.”

The letter pointed to Raisi’s role in the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners in Iran. It also stated that, in the past two months alone, Iranian authorities have executed at least 212 prisoners, “including seven political prisoners, three women, one juvenile offender, and a 17-year-old boy. At least three of those executions took place in public.”

The secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a coalition of Iranian opposition groups seeking to topple the regime, said in a statement that Raisi’s visit would be “an insult to human rights, the sacred right of asylum, and a stain on the history of the United Nations. It simply emboldens this regime in the killing of the people of Iran, the export of terrorism, and warmongering. He must be tried and punished for four decades of crimes against humanity and genocide.”

Members of Raisi’s planned entourage from the IRGC included Brig. Gen. Abdullah Mobini Dehkhodaee, who according to the NCRI was traveling to Geneva under the title of “deputy minister of interior and head of the Immigration Organization.”

A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN’s refugee agency, defended the decision to allow Raisi to attend this week’s forum.

“Iran is a member state of the United Nations and therefore invited to the Global Refugee Forum,” the spokesperson told The Algemeiner. “Iran has also been one of the largest refugee hosting countries for over 40 years.”

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