{mosimage}PRESS RELEASE - The Parliamentary election in Iran was a charade and its results do not reflect the wishes of the Iranian people. The vast majority of the Iranian people, responding to the call by the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, boycotted the polls in their millions.

{mosimage}PRESS RELEASE

The Parliamentary (Majlis) election in Iran was a charade and its results do not reflect the wishes of the Iranian people.

The vast majority of the Iranian people, responding to the call by the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, boycotted the polls in their millions.

Before the polls, the regime’s Guardian Council, whose clerical members are appointed by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, barred 2,700 candidates, including four former ministers, 30 deputy ministers, 10 governors and 73 Majlis deputies.

In what was dubbed as "engineering the elections" in favour of his subordinate President Ahmadinejad, Khamenei purged key candidates belonging to the factions affiliated with former presidents Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami (the so-called moderates), while allowing contenders who have either no chance of winning or little weight even if elected to stand to prevent an even larger boycott.

The President’s ultra-conservative faction, made up of former torturers and Revolutionary Guards commanders, now controls some three quarters of the Majlis, ensuring that the Supreme Leader’s fundamentalist policies continue even more.

Both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have vowed never to back down in their clandestine nuclear projects, the goal of which is a nuclear weapon to threaten the West. The Iranian leadership has also commanded the regime’s Revolutionary Guards Qods Force to kill Coalition troops and ordinary civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. The election process allowed Khamenei to remove any and all internal obstacles to the regime’s unlawful activities.

The rigged elections further alienated the regime from an increasingly discontented population. The people of Iran held more than 5,000 anti-government protests last year alone.

The International community must reject the results of the elections which the EU has rightly termed “neither free nor fair”.

Britain and the EU must now reach out to the Iranian people and their democratic Resistance movement, the NCRI, as they help to bring about freedom and democracy to their embattled homeland.

The policy of appeasing the mullahs must be set aside, as must talk of foreign military intervention in Iran. Instead we should give political backing to the NCRI and the PMOI in their quest for freedom for Iran.

Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
Chairman, British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom