Irwin Cotler, former Canadian justice minister, has been keeping busy. Here Terry Glavin details Cotler’s part in efforts ‘to focus the world’s attention on the victims of the Khomeinist despotism in Iran and to end the privileges of impunity that Tehran’s butchers have been enjoying all these years’.
This week in Ottawa, Cotler brought Conservative and Opposition MPs together around a House of Commons motion initiated by the Massacre88 Campaign, a movement of Iranian-Canadian lawyers, activists and academics. The motion makes Canada the first country in the world to formally recognize the Khomeinist slaughter of thousands of political prisoners in the summer of 1988 as a crime against humanity.
You can read the rest here.
Then, in the Jerusalem Post, Cotler himself highlights ‘the failure to prosecute and convict those responsible for the indiscriminate terroristic murder of Argentine civilians in 1992 and 1994 – attacks that targeted innocent civilians based on nothing more than their identity as Jews or Israelis’. Cotler writes:
It is simply unacceptable – and indeed incomprehensible – that, despite the issuance of six international arrest warrants there have been no convictions in connection with these horrendous terrorist attacks. Simply put, the Argentine government has failed to pursue any international juridical remedies against the Iranian regime for its demonstrable complicity in these acts of international terrorism, which clearly constitute grave violations of Argentine sovereignty and international human rights.
But worse, reports from 2011 show that Argentinian Foreign Minister Hector Timerman had reportedly offered to freeze the ongoing AMIA inquiry in exchange for enhanced economic relations with Iran, despite the outcry in Argentina by the families of the victims, Argentinian jurists, Argentinian special prosecutor Nisman himself, and the by the broader Argentine public.
‘Simply unacceptable’ – except for those for whom it isn’t.