VOA — WASHINGTON – Prominent Iran-based dissidents are urging the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to do more to hold Iranian officials accountable for wide-ranging rights abuses, in order to show Iranians the United States cares about their plight.
The former Iranian political prisoners, Abbas Vahedian Shahroudi and Mohammad Nikbakht, made the appeals via video messages from Iran to a conference at Washington’s National Press Club Wednesday organized by Iranian diaspora news site AVA Today.
“I personally believe President Joe Biden understands our suffering and concerns,” said Shahroudi, speaking in Farsi through an English translation provided by the event organizers.
Addressing Biden, Shahroudi said, “The Iranian opposition asks that you do not provide financial resources that make possible [Iranian leadership’s] economic survival. We [also] ask that you pursue [the regime’s] violators of human rights by preventing them and their families from working and thriving in Western countries.”
Shahroudi, who is based in the Iranian capital Tehran, said honoring those requests would help the U.S. to “wipe clean the bitter memories” the Iranian people have about what he called “wrong-minded U.S. interventions and mistakes of recent decades.”
Nikbakht, also speaking through an English translator in a video message recorded Tuesday from Isfahan, called on the Biden administration to place human rights issues at the top of any negotiations with Iran.
“Using human rights to pressure the regime will produce results because they are not capable of suppressing the entire nation,” Nikbakht said. “Please stay on the side of the Iranian people. If you ignore human rights, or devalue its importance, the Iranian people will suffer irreparable losses and lose confidence in the American people,” he added.
A report on Iran’s human rights situation by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, presented last week to the world body’s Human Rights Council, said Tehran’s record “remains of serious concern”. It said “impediments to the rule of law and weak justice and accountability mechanisms result in impunity, perpetuate existing [human rights] violations and increase the risk of future violations.”