TEHRAN -- Iran’s election authority said Friday Canada has not allowed voting to take place on its territory for people of Iranian origin in breach of international norms.
Esmail Mousavi, spokesman of the Interior Ministry’s Election Committee, said Iran’s permanent mission to the UN headquarters in New York pursued the issue with the Canadian delegation and Iran sent a letter to Canada through the Swiss embassy in Tehran but so far Ottawa has not responded.
“Unfortunately, no due response has so far been received from the Canadian government on the possibility of direct voting in the election,” he said.
“Given the limited amount of time left and a lack of possibility for the Foreign Ministry to dispatch executive officials, direct voting is not possible in Canada for the time being,” the election official added.
Canada adopted the same policy in Iran’s 2017 presidential election, when it did not allow Tehran to organize voting on its territory. The same happened in 2013 when Hassan Rouhani was elected president.
Like in 2017, Mousavi said Iran is planning to set up voting in a U.S. city close to the Canadian border for Canadian Iranians to travel to and vote. Iran sets up many voting stations in the United States, where more than a million Iranian dual citizens live.
Iran and Canada have not had diplomatic relations for nine years. In September 2012, Canada announced it was closing its embassy in Tehran.
In a tweet last week, Secretary of the Iranian Judiciary’s High

Council for Human Rights Ali Baqeri-Kani slammed Canada for politicizing the right of Iranian nationals to participate in the election.
“There are hundreds of thousands of Iranians residing in Canada, who are denied not only their consular rights but also the right to decide their fate through elections,” Baqeri-Kani said.
The human rights official said the Canadian government is “duty-bound to facilitate the participation of the Iranians residing in Canada in the presidential election,” slated for June 18.
Over 400,000 Iranians are estimated to be living in Canada where they are preserving their Iranian nationality.
Despite Tehran’s protests, the Ottawa government has stripped the Iranians in Canada of the right to receive consular services. Those expats have to travel to Iran or third countries for consular affairs.
Iran is holding its 13th presidential election on June 18. Over 59.3 million Iranians are eligible to vote in the election, according to the Iranian Interior Ministry.
On Friday, the body supervising campaigning in the 2021 presidential election gave President Hassan Rouhani’s administration eight minutes to respond to criticisms leveled by candidates during two rounds of debates.
Ehsan Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, a member of the Supervisory Commission of Presidential Campaigning, implied that the commission had made the decision after receiving complaints from the Rouhani administration.
“If a request or complaint is forwarded to the commission about the third debate, before the campaigning period ends, those complaints can be reviewed and broadcast,” he said.
The seven candidates running in the 2021 presidential election have held two live debates so far. All of them have attacked the Rouhani administration, even Nasser Hemmati, who was until recently the governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) by Rouhani’s decree, and who took much heat for a perceived affiliation with the president.
The criticisms have been mainly directed at the president’s economic record. A point-on-point inflation rate of approximately 50% affecting the livelihood of the middle- and lower-class Iranians has featured most significantly in the rebuttals, even though draconian U.S. sanctions have played a large part in damaging the Iranian economy since 2018 — including by attempting to take down Iran’s oil sales.
The sanctions escalated when former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the multilateral Iran nuclear deal three years ago. The Rouhani administration had promoted the deal, struck in 2015, as a diplomatic coup that removed significant hurdles in the way of Iranian economic progress.