The National Council of Resistance strongly condemns this action by the government of Holland which is a blatant violation of the sacred right to asylum, stipulated in the United Nations Convention of July 1951. The NCR also calls for immediate rescinding of this inhumane decision.
The clerical regime heads the lists of human rights abusers the world over and its rulers have been condemned 37 times in the past decade by the United Nations for the slaughter and torture of people and particularly for the oppression of Iranian women.
Repatriating asylum-seekers who have fled their homeland due to this regime's untamed suppression, therefore, has no meaning other than signing the orders for the arrest, torture and execution of the victims. Moreover, any complacency regarding their plight and refusal to grant them asylum only benefits the ruling religious, terrorist dictatorship.
Last week, the mullahs' Majlis passed a new penal code, giving the atrocities it has perpetrated against the Iranian people in the last 17 years a semblance of legality. The law stipulates the death sentence for anyone who would merely "insult Khomeini and Khamenei." What is more, according to the annual report by the Dutch Office of Internal Security, BVD, Iranian asylum-seekers are not spared the harassment of the clerics' intelligence agents even in the Netherlands.
The NCR holds the Dutch government responsible for the lives of these Iranian asylum-seekers. It calls on Dutch parliamentarians and international human rights organizations and those defending the rights of asylum-seekers to urgently intervene to prevent the expulsion of these victims.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran - Paris
July 17, 1996
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