Iran‘s clerical regime could face intensified international sanctions pressure over its violent response to the protests against Mahsa Amini’s recent death in police custody.
“We are sanctioning the so-called morality police like the U.S. is doing — and key leaders of that morality police,” Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told reporters Friday during a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “But I must say that lots of things are on the table. And we’ve done a lot, but we need to do more and will do more.”
Iranian officials have ordered security forces to “severely confront” the protesters, according to an Amnesty International report that cited leaked government documents, leading to a wave of violence that reportedly has left dozens dead. Their apparent brutality represents an attempt to grapple with a nationwide uproar that stands as the second major protest this year and the fifth outcry since 2017.
“The Iranian population is staying on the coming onto the street more often … between shorter intervals,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu told the Washington Examiner. “These protests are not going away anytime soon. And like I said, the diminishing period of time between each iteration of protests is not lost on the regime. The most [recent] significant round was in May of 2022.”
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The latest uprising was sparked by the death of Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who fell into a coma after Iranian authorities seized her in relation to an alleged infraction related to the wearing of her hijab. The unfolding protests have given vent “to broader grievances against the political establishment and encompassed demands for the end of the Islamic Republic system,” according to an Amnesty International report on the political crisis.
“The Iranian authorities’ ongoing campaign to crush these protests has involved extensive deployment of riot police, Revolutionary Guards, the Basij paramilitary force, the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran and plainclothes security agents,” the human rights organization added, citing eyewitness interviews and information from Iranian journalists. “The crackdown has left dozens of men, women and children dead and hundreds more horrifically injured.”
Iranian officials have attempted to short-circuit the dissidents by imposing an internet blackout, in addition to launching ballistic missiles and other ordnance at the Kurdish region of neighboring Iraq, which Tehran has accused of fomenting the protests. That crackdown has created a surge in Iranian demand for virtual private networks and other programs designed to circumvent surveillance and restrictions. The Biden administration has sought to encourage those efforts by offering federal licenses to companies capable of providing “communications equipment, software and hardware, to Iranians,” as Blinken emphasized Friday.
“We’ll continue to look for ways to support those who are engaging in expressing themselves peacefully in Iran as well as taking actions against those who are responsible for the most repressive human rights violations that one can imagine,” he said. “There’s also a growing chorus of condemnation around the world, including in international institutions, something that the foreign minister and I discussed today.”
That international backlash could lead to a stiffening of sanctions imposed on Iran by the European Union after years of tailoring European sanctions policies to the requirements of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which the United States exited in 2018. Since President Joe Biden took office, U.S. and European officials have sought to rehabilitate the pact, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, but Iranian leaders have refused to accept a deal proposed by the Biden administration, and Western powers seem inclined not to allow the stalled talks to prevent a response to the protests.
“I am doing everything I can within the EU framework so that we can start to impose sanctions, especially now, while we keep negotiating on the JCPOA,” Germany‘s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, told German lawmakers on Thursday. “Because the woman in Iran need to be sure that we [are] standing by their side not just today, but tomorrow, and the day after as well, after the attention has shifted elsewhere.”
Such rhetoric may signal a Western willingness to proceed with a broader array of international pressure on Iran, independent of the fate of the nuclear talks.
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“Time will tell if the desire to move towards something beyond the JCPOA materializes and if the West does manage to put their money where their mouth is on standing with the Iranian people,” said Ben Taleblu, a longtime critic of the Biden administration and Western European approach to Iran. “Right now, the human rights penalties and desire to condemn the Islamic Republic, that should be the price floor. Everybody with shared and overlapping [sanctions] authorities should be sharing targets, should be sharing intelligence, should be using open source information to identify targets.”
