Iran’s rights chief:
Canada’s blacklisting of IRGC ‘bitter irony’
The secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights has strongly condemned an earlier hostile move by Canada to designate the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization.”
MEHR: The secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights has strongly condemned an earlier hostile move by Canada to designate the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “terrorist organization.”
“We vehemently condemn the hostile measure by Canada,” Kazem Gharibabadi wrote in a post on X, former Twitter, on Wednesday, saying the move “opposes the principles of the international law.”
“It is a bitter irony that the country, which is, itself, among the major violators of human rights and a supporter of terrorism, has placed the name of the Corps, which bears responsibility for guarding the national security and confronting terrorism in the region, in [its] self-proclaimed terrorist list,” he added.
Gharibabadi was apparently referring, among other things, to Canada’s widely-documented dark history of mistreating indigenous people and the country’s support for the anti-Iran terrorist cult of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which Ottawa crossed out of its terror list in 2012.
The Iranian official’s comments came hours after Canada’s Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced that the country had listed the IRGC, which is credited for its domestic and regional anti-terror endeavor, “as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code."
Last month, the Canadian House of Commons adopted a non-binding resolution calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to blacklist the IRGC and expel an estimated 700 Iranians.
Reacting to the motion at the time, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani called it "unwise."
