TEHRAN -- A senior Iranian rights official says the United States is in no position to talk about the issue of human rights given its far-and-wide violations on the international stage.
“The United States is, by no means, qualified to talk about the issue of human rights,” Kazem Gharibabadi said.
The official made the remarks on the sidelines of the fourth International Conference on the American Human Rights from the Perspective of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
The U.S. administration “should be held responsible to the oppressed peoples, who have lost their lives as a result of terrorism, sanctions, aggression, and occupation,” Gharibabadi added.
He cited the example of the people of Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and its allies have been waging a U.S.-backed war.
The Yemenis are still being deprived of receiving the most basic humanitarian assistance due to the invaders and their supporters’ “imperialist disposition of and great human rights violations,” the official noted.
Addressing the conference, deputy foreign minister Ali Baqeri-Kani said trampling on independent peoples’ human rights is a “part and parcel” of the United States’ foreign policy.
“One can confidently claim that there is no nation in today’s world that has not tasted the bitter taste” of the American version of human rights, he said.
The biggest violation that can be committed against human rights is to “politicize” the issue, he said, adding, “Today, human rights are turned into a pretext and a tool for expansion and institutionalization of the predominance of American unilateralism.”
Baqeri-Kani said “sanctions and terrorism” are the main pillars of the American version of human rights.
“If they are robbed of these two pillars, they may not be able to continue their dominance and plots.”
Every year in late June and early July,
Iranian activists get together to commemorate what they call the American Human Rights Week to recount instances of U.S. rights abuses in Iran.
The week-long occasion marks a series of tragic incidents all falling within the same time frame, killing hundreds of Iranians in the early years after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Rights activists say in all of those instances, the footprints of the U.S. can be traced.
One of the most tragic incidents was the 1988 shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the U.S. navy, which killed all of the 290 people on board the doomed plane.
More than three decades on and Iran is still waiting for an apology from Washington. Rights activists believe the U.S. has not abandoned its double standards regarding human rights.
The American Human Rights week also marks the 1981 bombing of the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Republic party, carried out by the MKO terrorist organization.
Seventy-three leading officials, including then chief justice Ayatollah Muhammad Beheshti were killed in the blast.
The Islamic Republic says the MKO is responsible for killing 12,000 Iranians in terror attacks. In 2012, the U.S. and Europe delisted the MKO as a terrorist entity and since then, they have been taking part in the terror group’s annual summits in Paris.
The 1987 chemical bombardment of Iran’s city of Sardasht is another incident that falls on the same period in the Iranian calendar.
Iraq’s chemical weapons were reportedly produced using materials supplied by the U.S. and other Western countries.
Activists say Washington has so far shrugged off its crimes in Iran, and that’s why they mark the American Human Rights Week every year to take a jab at the U.S. and question its selective approach to human rights.