By Iran Probe Staff
Monday, 29 January 2018
Full text of Nigel Evans’s speech at a meeting in the Parliamentary Assembly of council of Europe in Strasburg calling for release of the detained Iranian Protesters on January 24:
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi addressed the official meetings of the European People’s Party (EPP),
the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), and the Unified European Left (UEL) at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, on Wednesday, January 24, 2018. Nigel Evans, member of the European Conservatives Group in PACE made the following remarks during the visit:
Thanks very much and thank you Mrs. Rajavi for your words today and indeed the struggle that you fighting along with many of your fellow citizens to get freedom in Iran.
I represent the conservative party in the United Kingdom and the one thing that we stand for as members of this council is democracy and human rights.
Those are the two things that enshrine why I am a member of this particular party and those are the two things that sadly are being denied to the people of Iran.
That’s why we have seen protests the like of which we’ve not seen, even greater than the protests of 2009 which were brutally suppressed and now we are seeing many many more people in many more cities rising up not just about poverty which is clearly a huge worry for them, but is also to fight for the denial of human rights that people in Iran are facing and nothing exemplifies that more than the reaction of the regime to these protests.
We have protests in the United Kingdom on a regular basis where people don’t like what the government does and of course we respect people’s right to say when they disagree with what the government does. That’s the democratic way. We’ve had a referendum in the United Kingdom recently where the British people voted to leave the European Union.
Not everybody likes that, that’s democracy and so what I would say is to echo the words of Mrs. Rajavi and that is to say that the people of Iran have rights, they have human rights, they have dignity and the regime may be able to torture some of their citizens, they may be able to imprison some of their citizens, thousands of their citizens and indeed kill that many of their citizens which we have seen. What they cannot do is kill the human spirit cannot kill the will of the people of Iran who want to see change. And so as brutal as this regime currently is, they will not in the end win.
It is the human spirit, it is human dignity, it is the fight of the people of Iran that will in the end defeat this hideous and brutal regime and I would say to you Mrs. Rajavi is I am distressed that the voice of governments throughout the whole of Europe are not as loud as they should be and when I go back to the United Kingdom.
I will certainly be bringing the voice of the Iranian people to my Government to my Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and ask them to stand up and to be heard and for those people who sadly have died at the hands of this brutal regime, and their voices have been silenced.
Let’s be their voice. Good luck to the people of Iran.
