SPEECH – EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT, 10 DECEMBER 2025

International Human Rights Day

“Iran: Human Rights, Accountability and the Role of the EU”

Ladies and gentlemen,

This year, after decades of proxy wars and nuclear deceit, the fires the mullahs lit across the Middle East finally reached their own doorstep. The air strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites, and key Revolutionary Guard facilities, exposed the regime’s vulnerability. But let us be clear: airstrikes alone cannot uproot the central source of instability in the Middle East. The epicentre remains in Tehran. And the only force capable of removing it is the Iranian people themselves.

For forty-six long years, the clerical dictatorship has crushed its own citizens with a brutality that amounts to crimes against humanity. Executions, torture, amputations, disappearances, and medieval punishments are the daily machinery of the state. Women are beaten into submission by the morality police. Ethnic and religious minorities are persecuted. Tens of thousands of political prisoners, many of them supporters of the MEK, have been murdered in cold blood. The 1988 massacre of 30,000 prisoners remains one of the greatest atrocities of the late 20th century, and yet its architects walk freely in Tehran’s corridors of power. This is a regime that has never known justice, and never permitted mercy. And these crimes are ongoing, reflected in 1,932 executions in 2025 so far, and a horrific 335 executions in November alone. Under the so-called moderate Masoud Pezeshkian, 2,633 people have been sent to gallows.

Inside Iran today, inflation has soared to almost 40%. The rial has collapsed. Three-quarters of the population now live below the poverty line. Millions of educated young Iranians see their lives evaporate under the weight of corruption and mismanagement. But while the people starve, the regime spends billions bankrolling Hezbollah, arming the Houthis, and building proxy militias from Iraq to Gaza. Every conflict in the region bears the blood-stained fingerprints of the Revolutionary Guards.

And yet, despite this tyranny, the flame of resistance has never gone out. Across Iran, resistance units linked to the MEK have multiplied at extraordinary speed. Young men and women, unarmed, idealistic, courageous, are risking arrest, torture, even execution, to challenge the entire apparatus of repression. This organised, rooted, and expanding resistance movement is uniquely placed to lead Iran toward freedom and a democratic republic, where theocracy and monarchy have no place. The regime knows this. That is why it hunts these young activists relentlessly. But it has failed to stop them.

And behind this movement stands the NCRI, the longest-lasting political coalition in Iran’s modern history, with Maryam Rajavi’s ten-point plan for a secular, democratic republic. A plan that abolishes the death penalty, enshrines gender equality, protects minorities, guarantees free elections, and promises peaceful coexistence with Iran’s neighbours. This is not an abstract dream. It is a practical blueprint for a new Iran, one that rejects the cruelty, corruption, and fanaticism that have defined the current regime.

Let us imagine for a moment what the fall of the mullahs would mean. No more Iranian missiles fired from Yemen. No more Hezbollah domination of Lebanon. No more militias carving up Iraq. No more nuclear blackmail threatening the world. The liberation of 90 million Iranians would reshape the entire Middle East.

But change will not come by appeasement. Too many European governments have cowered behind the shameful language of “engagement”. They have turned a blind eye to death sentences and torture chambers, to hostage-taking, to cross-border terrorism, and to the targeting of exiled dissidents here on European soil. Some EU leaders have even tried to muzzle the democratic opposition in exile, in blatant violation of international law. This is not diplomacy. It is moral cowardice. It is complicity with tyranny.

It is time to close Iranian embassies in Europe. Time to expel the regime’s agents. Time for France, the UK, and the EU to follow America, Canada, and Australia in blacklisting the IRGC as the terrorist organisation it is. The West must stand unequivocally with the Iranian people, not the tyrants who oppress them.

The Iranian regime has outlived its legitimacy. Like every dictatorship built on fear, lies, and violence, its collapse is inevitable. The only question is whether the democratic world will stand with the Iranian people at the moment of their liberation.

Ladies and gentlemen, the hour of change is approaching. Let us make sure that when history is written, Europe will not be remembered as the continent that stood on the wrong side.

Thank you.