Anti-Iran government elements in Washington are trying to restrict Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this fall.
Lobby groups on Capitol Hill have urged Biden’s administration to deny the Iranian entire Iranian delegation the visas to attend meetings at UN headquarters in New York.
Critics are propagating that Raisi, as deputy prosecutor of Tehran in 1988, allegedly participated in an execution commission that sentenced 5,000 people to capital punishment on political grounds, TRT World reported today.
People were deprived of their lives “without the right to appeal or a fair trial,” human rights activists and critics say, pointing out that the former head of the judiciary continued his persecution in later years.
Iran has dismissed accusations, stressing that only those “counterrevolutionary” activists who had staged an armed uprising had received capital punishment.
In 2019, in an era of “maximum pressure” policy under former President Donald Trump’s administration, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control put Raisi’s name on its sanctions lists.
For Tehran’s opponents, this becomes a formal reason to demand new restrictions on the President of the Islamic Republic. The mobilisation comes from organisations affiliated with the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of a dissident left-wing radical group, as well as the Republican line.
The White House has already been called upon to respond by senators led by Tom Cotton, as well as by former Trump administration officials who expect to return to power in the post-Biden era.
