Irwin Cotler calls for end to ‘wave of executions’ in Iran

Canadian parliamentarian Irwin Cotler decried in Canada’s House of Commons three impending executions in Iran and the country’s treatment of its Baha’i religious minority.

Cotler, a prominent Jewish human rights lawyer who previously served as Canada’s attorney general and justice minister, called for an end to “the wave of wanton executions in Iran, and the intensified persecution of the Baha’i.”

He specifically identified imprisoned senior Shiite cleric Ayatollah Hossein-Kazamani Boroujerdi, physicist Omid Kokabee, and sexual assault victim Rayhaneh Jabbari.

According to the Gatestone Institute, Boroujeri was sentenced to an 11-year-sentence for advocating the separation of the state and religion in Iran. He is said to have been repeatedly tortured, and his wife was reportedly raped in front of other family members.

Boroujerdi’s imprisonment “is a shocking example of the massive repression that has prevailed despite the reputed moderation under Rouhani,” said Cotler, referring to Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani.

Kokabee, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, was arrested in 2011 during a visit to his family in Iran. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “communicating with a hostile government.”

According to Amnesty International, Kokabee was imprisoned for repeatedly refusing to work on Iranian military projects.

Jabbari is in prison for the 2007 killing of a former Iranian intelligence official who she claims drugged and tried to rape her. Cotler said her conviction was “based on a coerced confession and a Kafkaesque proceeding.”

Cotler, who serves as the co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran, ask his fellow MPs to “join him in calling on President Rouhani to cease and desist from this wanton execution binge and to release these three prisoners threatened with imminent execution, along with other political prisoners, such as the leadership of the Baha’i, and to end Iran’s culture of impunity.”