Maryam Rajavi: Any concession to Tehran's rulers disregards Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- No one has violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the past 50 years, as has the clerical regime

In a detailed statement on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the Iranian Resistance's President-elect, congratulated all those endeavoring for freedom and advocating human rights the world over. She expressed the hope that with the overthrow of the mullahs' anti-human regime, the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be put in practice in her fettered homeland.

The Iranian Resistance's President-elect said: With its countless crimes -- executions, torture and imprisonment of 500,000 dissidents, sending one million people to their deaths in an anti-patriotic war, and ruthless discrimination against women and ethnic and religious minorities over the past two decades -- the theocratic regime ruling Iran is doubtless the worst violator of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These breaches are not limited to the criminal conduct of this medieval regime alone, but embedded in its laws, which formally and systematically contradict the principles of this international convention, Mrs. Rajavi added.

She stressed: The very existence of this regime -- founded on the rule of velayat-e faqih in contradiction to popular sovereignty -- flagrantly defies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which views people's will as the essence and source of power of the government which must be expressed in a fair and periodical election.

Mrs. Rajavi enumerated the regime's crimes during Khatami's tenure which includes the continuation and escalation of on-the-spot executions and stoning. She emphasized that any political or economic concession to the clerical regime, by anyone and under any pretext, is a blatant disregard for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the by-product of the struggles of billions of people against oppression and injustice in the past centuries and millenniums.

Mrs. Rajavi pointed out: The time has come for the world community to recognize the Iranian people's just resistance against the mullahs' medieval regime. For according to the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the only recourse in the face of such tyrannical regimes is to try to overthrow them.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
December 10, 1998

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