Iranian Official Raps Europe's Double-Standard Approach to Human Rights
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – A senior Iranian judiciary official questioned Europe's double-standard approaches to human rights, saying that the Europeans show unreasonable sensitivity to the execution of criminals in Iran but have remained silent on the massacre of innocent people by their regional allies.
"The main reason for the high rate of executions in our country is the Islamic Republic of Iran's constant battle against trafficking of narcotics whose final destination is the capitals of the European Union states," Chief of the Iranian Judiciary's Human Rights Council Mohammad Javad Larijani said Sunday in a meeting in Tehran with a delegation from the European Parliament (EP).
"We are fighting the traffickers who have targeted human lives, and the execution of such people raises the sensitivity of the (very) Europeans ... who do not care about the killing of innocent people by their regional allies," the Iranian official regretted.
He further touched on the military campaign that Saudi Arabia –a close ally of the West- has launched against Yemen, and criticized Europe's muted response to months of aerial strikes on innocent people of Yemen.
On March 26, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies began to launch air strikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to the fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.
According to Yemen's Freedom House Foundation, the Saudi airstrikes have claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Yemeni people so far while more than 7,000 others have been wounded, most of them civilians.
In the latest Saudi-led attacks, at least 44 people were killed and 180 others wounded in air strikes on Sana'a early Sunday.