Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have spoken in this place before about my friend Mohammed Sadeghpour, an Australian citizen of Iranian descent who advocates strongly for a group of people who are trapped in Iraq at a place called Camp Liberty—a misnomer if ever there was one. There are about 3,000 Iranian people who are all members of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, and they have been trapped at Camp Liberty near Baghdad airport after they transferred from Camp Ashraf in December 2011 through to February 2012. This group of people includes around 1,000 women and children who have all been classified as asylum seekers by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but, while they are trapped in that area, they are subject to regular missile attacks and harassment from the Iraqi government.

The fear of the people at Camp Liberty is that somehow they will be forcibly returned to Iran. They left Iran because they had fallen out with the then government and have lived in Iraq for a number of years, under the protection of the Iraqi government of the time and also under the protection of the UN.

We know about the human rights record of Iran. Amnesty International, who put out regular bulletins, talk about the severe restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and assembly. Dissidents and human rights defenders, including minority rights and women's rights activists, are arbitrarily arrested, detained, imprisoned after unfair trials and banned from travelling abroad. There are scores of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners. Many people do not know where family members have gone after they have been subject to arrest. We know that there is torture and other ill-treatment, and we know that there is a particular focus on stopping freedom of expression in the community. We also know that the judicial punishments of flogging and amputation continue to be used.

But most appalling—and these always horrify me—are the statistics around executions that take place in Iran. We do not even know the absolute figures. The records provided by the Iranian government are clearly inaccurate because we know, from information that is smuggled out of the country and also discussed freely with the community, that the numbers are much higher. The total number of executions in Iran in 2014 up to 5 May was, we believe, around 280, with only about 100 of those being announced publicly by the regime. Most of the people who are executed are political prisoners, and there is a clear policy of rapid execution, including public executions, to instil fear in the society. And we know that the Iranian society is undergoing a severe economic and political crisis.

All that data is publicly known, and sometimes, when you receive information from Amnesty and even from people who come to visit you, it almost begins to be an academic exercise. But the last time that Mohammed came to see me—I had expected him to see me regularly because he comes to talk about what is happening for the people in Camp Liberty—he was talking specifically about one prisoner in Iran for whom he was very fearful. The gentleman about whom he was talking was Mr Gholamreza Khosravi Savadjani who had been, at that time, transferred from the area in which he had been held to an area which we knew was where people went just before they were executed. Mohammed was telling me about Mr Khosravi. He was 49 and had one child—and we had photographs of him with his kid, playing soccer, and at this time when we are all looking at the World Cup, and many of us are losing sleep at night watching that, somehow seeing that photograph of this father and son together on a soccer field was very familiar. But what we discovered, after we had heard about him being transferred, was that he had been executed.

The reality of just this one case—Mohammad was talking to me about what the background of this gentleman was—is that he had been condemned to death on the charge of moharebeh, which means 'enmity towards God'. He had been condemned to death on 21 April 2012 for making a donation to support the cable TV service of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran. Making a donation to a political group, an enemy of the state, actually caused capital punishment. Amidst all the discussions, the theory, to find out the history of this one man was particularly confronting, and it made all the theories and all the figures very real. We know that this is a daily occurrence in that nation, and we have figures that say that it is increasing, that there are more executions taking place, all at a time when publicly, internationally, we are talking about a more compassionate regime, a new way of operating in Iran. But these horrific human rights attacks continue to occur.

Within this environment, we hear about the group of people who are still trapped in Camp Liberty. They have been assessed by the UNHCR. As I said, there are about 3,000 people in that establishment, but only 300 have been relocated to safe Third World countries—almost 100 to Germany, which has a very strong record in this area, and about 200 to Albania. We have not taken or forwarded any action to take people from the camp to Australia, even though we know that these people have family friends here who are desperately seeking their safety and to be able to support them.

On June 27 this year there will be a huge rally in Paris to advocate for democracy in Iran. This is an annual event. It will be attended, we believe, by over 120,000, if attendances of recent years can give any indication. Among them will be hundreds of members of parliament, mainly from Europe, North America and the Middle East, and people who are concerned about making sure that there is a public statement about human rights and democracy in Iran.

We know that there are issues. We have people in our community who understand these things, who have friends and family caught up in this horror. We cannot pretend this is not happening. We know there is a massive sentiment for democratic change among Iranian people. And at the international level the president-elect of the Council of Resistance of Iran, Mrs Maryam Rajavi, continues to speak out in Europe calling for democracy in her homeland of Iran.

We are not talking about telling other countries how they should run their business. What we are talking about is understanding the clear principles of democracy and human rights. There is evidence to say that the regime in Iran is not effectively promoting human rights within the community. Simply the stories about the regular executions are enough for us to say that this is not what we expect from a country that has an effective democracy. It concerns me that our country is now beginning to enter into enhanced trade agreements with Iran. I think it is very important that we have interaction. I think it is important for our country to ensure that we can best look after our own primary producers, because most of this is about the live export trade. Nonetheless, within this interchange there should be some space to talk about our expectation that other nations have similar approaches to human rights and democratic practice as we do if we are going to be involved in commercial exchange.

I think Australia has a role to play. We were active in the Iraqi conflict and we know horror is continuing to occur in that nation now. We had this group of people seeking asylum in Iraq, where the situation is degenerating so quickly, even as we speak. So, again, I put the case to our Australian government and our community: we should talk with the people who are in Camp Liberty, as it is well known. We should make sure that our embassy officials visit that camp and talk to the people directly. We should ensure that there is some understanding of their genuine asylum status and that we work towards making sure that no more people like the gentleman who was executed quite recently will be victims of a regime that has very little similarity and very few links with our nation.