International community cannot remain indifferent to attempts to intimidate girls and women in Iran

In a resolution, the European Parliament has condemned the poisoning of thousands of schoolgirls in Iran since November as a cruel attack to silence women.

“This is a frontal attack on girls’ educations, which has so far gone unchallenged in Iran. The regime’s months of inaction and deliberate suppression of credible reports of the systematic poisoning of schoolgirls is unacceptable”, said ECR shadow rapporteur Assita Kanko after today’s adoption.

Kanko continued:

“Ayatollah Khamenei may condemn this cowardly act in grand terms, but he must not get away scot-free. When protests erupted after Mahsa Amini’s death, he said that reckless behaviour should be punished, and those protests were led by young schoolgirls.

“We must demand from the Iranian government that the right to education includes girls and that those responsible for the attacks are held to account. An independent, international investigation, for example by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran established by the UN Human Rights Council in November 2022, can help break this impunity. In my view, the same applies to those responsible for injuring and killing children in the violent crackdown on protests in Iran.”

In recent months, the ECR Group has repeatedly expressed its solidarity with the Iranian people protesting for a free and democratic country and against the forced veiling of women. The ECR has also called for the immediate and unconditional release of all those arrested, for an end to the executions of demonstrators by the Iranian regime and for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has begun harassing staff and parents of girls in hospitals, to be placed on the EU terrorist list.

The European Parliament resolution calls on the UN Human Rights Council to mandate the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (IIFFM) to conduct an independent investigation and urges the Iranian authorities to grant full access to the UN IIFFM and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran.