Enrique Mora, Deputy Secretary General of the European Union, along with Stephan Klement, EU Ambassador to Vienna, and Bruno Scholl, head of the Iran Task Force at the European Union arrived in Tehran on Tuesday, August 3, to attend the “inauguration ceremony” of Ebrahim Raisi, former member of Death Commission and current appointee of Ali Khamenei as the head of Islamic Republic government. Following the reports, a wave of criticism of the EU action was launched on social media:

In an interview with AFP, Prince Reza Pahlavi described the EU’s move as “very shocking” and described it as “slapping the Iranian people in the face”; an action that is a kind of “legitimizing what should not be legitimized”:

Referring to the European and dual citizen hostages who are currently being held in the Islamic Republic’s prisons for no reason, Masih Alinejad called the deployment of a delegation by the European Union to attend the inauguration of Raisi “endangering” the lives of European citizens.

The same time with this tweet, Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced Nahid Taghavi, a German / Iranian citizen, to 10 years and 8 months in prison. Nahid Taghavi was arrested by intelligence forces at her home in Tehran on October 16, 2020. when Raisi was the head of Judiciary. The 66-year-old diabetic, who currently has COVID-19 too, has been under intense interrogations for several months without access to a lawyer and even without being charged, and without access to medicine and medical care has been severely tortured in solitary confinement in the IRGC Intelligence Detention Center.

Italian newspaper Il Foglio in an article headlined “Europe visits butcher in Tehran” wrote: “Raisi is reflection of extremism and hardliners in Iran who do not want to have a better relation with the West.” Meanwhile, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, according to the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency, quoting the embassy of the Islamic Republic in Rome, sent his congratulatory message to the Executionary Ayatollah: “On behalf of myself, government and people of Italy, I wish you success in progressing the important responsibility that is behest to you.”

Bijan Djir-Sarai, an Iranian national in the German Bundestag, called the European Union’s policy towards the Islamic Republic shameful. The German parlimant representative in a tweet said: “In Iran, a bloodthirsty judge becomes the president of the Islamic Republic through a sham election. What does the EU do? It ignores human rights and sends a representative to the inauguration ceremony. The European Union policy towards the Islamic Republic can only cause human shame.”

Amnesty International also tweeted about the grave shadow of crimes against humanity on the inauguration ceremony of Ebrahim Raisi:

The human rights organization called for a criminal investigation into the role of Ebrahim Raisi during the 1988 massacre. Amnesty in its 2018 report, announced the number of people executed that year was about 5,000 people; the organization says the figure is probably higher.

“The European Union supports killings and torture in Iran,” said Joachim Kuhs, a member of the European Parliament’s budget committee, in protest of sending a special delegation to attend the inauguration of Ebrahim Raisi. “While the Iranian people take to the streets to protest against the extremist Islamic regime, Brussels supports the illegitimate regime. The European Union (EU) has provided € 60 million to the regime over the past five years, according to the Transparency International portal. With this financial assistance and by sending a special delegation to attend the inauguration ceremony, the European Union is sending a fatal message to the Tehran regime, to the Iranian opposition forces and to the world, making itself an accomplice in mass killings, torture and arbitrary arrests.”

Iranian people, those who take to the streets empty-handed and shout “Death to the Islamic Republic”, those who are arrested, tortured and executed, those who boycott the regime’s sham elections and seek basic civil rights and break the chains of theocratic tyranny, the ones who go to war with one of the most ruthless and savage oppression machines in the world, they will not forget this approach of the European Union.

Translation of this post by Sahar.