Sens. Marco Rubio and Mark Kirk want President Obama to pay more attention to Iran’s human rights record.
The world remains focused on Iran’s growing nuclear threat and support of terrorists, but continues to neglect the human rights abuses and suppression blatantly happening to the country’s people — and something needs to be done by the Obama administration, the Republican senators wrote on Friday in an op-ed in the Daily Beast.
A new report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, found the country executed 687 Iranians in 2013 and already 411 in the first half of 2014.
Iranian authorities are also continuing the “widespread and systematic use” of psychological and physical torture, the Shaheed report reveals, yet the Obama administration refuses to lead a global movement against the human rights violations, Rubio and Kirk wrote.
“Just as the Iranian people continue to suffer under [Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani, so too have Iran’s nuclear evasions and lethal support to terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and murderous like Syria’s Assad regime continued apace,” they wrote.
Besides Secretary of State John Kerry calling Iran’s human rights record “abysmal,” Rubio and Kirk wrote, the Obama administration has done “precious little” to fix what is happening in Iran.
“The advance of human dignity in Iran,” they wrote, “will have much more to do with whether the regime in Tehran truly decides to change its illegitimate and destabilizing course and become a responsible actor on the world stage than any document it signs in Geneva or Vienna.”
